Saving hidden files?

F

freaky

OSXer
Can somebody tell me what I need to do in order to be able to save a hidden file such as an .htaccess file on Panther? If I use BBEdit and create the file, then when i go to do Save As, the Save button doesn't let me click on it if I name the file .htaccess. I'm not sure if this is just something with BBEdit or OS X, but if anyone knows how to fix this please let me know!
 
It's something with OS X. You can't save a file from any application if it starts with a '.'.

To do this, you'll need to save it, and then, from the terminal: sudo mv [filename] .[filename]
 
Uh! What a pain. Wonder what they were thinking??? I've been copying an existing file over to the directory I wanted to save it in then open it.

I wonder if anybody's made a hack to get around this??
 
There are other 3rd party apps that do this. It makes perfect sense to make '.' at the beginning of a filename illegal. For most people, it would be very confusing for items to disappear without visible warning.
 
just create the file in terminal "touch .htaccess", open it in BBEdit and I believe you can save i now (command+s)
 
freaky said:
Uh! What a pain. Wonder what they were thinking??? I've been copying an existing file over to the directory I wanted to save it in then open it.
Click to expand...
The dot as the first character in a file name is Unix Speak for "this is an invisible file." The assumption is invisible files are invisible to protect them from ill advised damage or deletion, so OS X treats them as protected.

Be advised that renaming system files that have a dot as the first character in the file name will make all system references to the file invalid. In the early days of OS X, a "feature" of Norton Utilities assumed that a dot first character in a file name was an error so it "fix" the file files by eliminating the dot. This "fix" immediately rendered OS X unbootable and inoperative. The only possible recovery being a reinstall.
 
I can understand hiding important OS files so they save them with a "." in the beginnning, but preventing us from being able to save new files is ridiculous. I've read a ton of articles on how OS X is so user friendly for web development since you can easily run Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc all in a UNIX environment. Since you can't easily save common files used in Apache such as .htaccess and .htpasswd, really sucks.

It would be much easier if I could just save them in the program I am working in rather than having to open a new Terminal shell, browsing to the Volume/directory I am working in, and creating the file, then refreshing the folder I'm viewing just to open it in BBEdit.
 
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