If I am replying to an email in Folder "TEST", how do I get a reply to automatically go to the Folder "TEST" as opposed to the Sent folder? This helps with productivity so that I don't have to move the responses to the folders they are in. If the message responding to resides in the inbox, the response will go to the Sent folder and can be moved to another folder at another time.

I read that I could rename a folder to have the..tmp extension to prevent it syncing over. I did this to a folder that had some confidential files, but I renamed the folder in my icloud drive and the files have all disappeared. I found a copy of the folder on the desktop, but that was also empty. Any idea where I could locate these files or are they lost?

When viewing ~/Library/Containers not all com.Foo.Bar/ folders are visible. They can be accessed using the terminal but is there a way to make them visible in the viewer as well? Why are some folders hidden like this? Edit: ls -delO@ results Visible folder:

com.apple.containermanager.identifier	 18
	com.apple.containermanager.schema-version	  2
	com.apple.containermanager.uuid	 36

Invisible folder:

com.apple.FinderInfo	 32
	com.apple.containermanager.identifier	 25
	com.apple.containermanager.schema-version	  2
	com.apple.containermanager.uuid	 36
	com.apple.data-container-personality	260056

I was wondering if MacOS Mojave (the most recent version I can be on due to some very expensive 32 bit applications) has a way to set up a system level "virtual" dir, or virtual drive, that combines two or more external drives and surfaces them as if they're one directory/drive to all applications. E.g. something that lets me say "create a virtual dir/drive called audio data" (that *isn't* JBOD/RAID0) and then specify two (or more) external SSDs such that the content of that dir/drive is the combined content of the solid state drives. If one has dirs Pro Logic data and Cubase data and the other has dirs Kontakt and Samples, then I'd like a single virtual dir/drive that shows:

--- data
 |--- Cubase Data
 |--- Kontakt
 |--- Pro Logic Data
 |--- Samples

When both SSD are connected, or if one of them's not connected, show

--- data
 |--- Cubase Data
 |--- Pro Logic Data

or

--- data
 |--- Kontakt
 |--- Samples

depending on which drive's still accessible. Or a flatout empty dir/drive if nothing's connected. With the explicit intent that if the SSDs that house dirs that some applications rely on aren't connected, then yes: those applications will throw errors. That's fine, and expected. I just want something that lets me surface a ton of data spread over multiple drives as a single dir/drive when they're all connected, with each SSD being "just a drive" that can also be connected to any random other computer that knows how to read/write the SSD's filesystem.

I listed all the hidden directories in my home directory and noticed four with names like .bfglF7097T2L1. They all have the format .bfglF[0-9]{4}T2L1, store a file named .sysdata, and have "staff" for the group owner. I've never noticed them before (and I do use Terminal and edit hidden files pretty frequently), even though some are dated as early as 2014. Googling around I can't find a single reference to these folders or what they are used for. What are they for? I don't like keeping mystery folders but I'm scared to delete them. PS I'm currently using macOS Mojave.

Due to a problem with contact synchronization (not sure what was the source of the problem, probably a program crash on powercut, which caused inconsistency in contact's database file), the synchronization process created nearly 7M files in Images/:

hostname:Images username$ pwd
/Users/username/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources/4D81D34B-C932-4578-8A31-4E2E244B3875/Images

hostname:Images username$ ls
^C

hostname:Images username$ ls | wc -l
 6797073
(the result was after hours)

hostname:Images username$ cd ..
hostname:4D81D34B-C932-4578-8A31-4E2E244B3875 username$ ls -l
total 600224
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff     409600 Aug  2 17:43 AddressBook-v22.abcddb
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff      32768 Aug  3 00:13 AddressBook-v22.abcddb-shm
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff    2727472 Aug  2 23:26 AddressBook-v22.abcddb-wal
drwx------  65535 username  staff  231100550 Aug  2 23:26 Images
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff      45056 Dec  7  2017 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff      32768 Dec  7  2017 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr-shm
-rw-r--r--@     1 username  staff       4152 Dec  7  2017 MailRecents-v4.abcdmr-wal
drwx------      5 username  staff        170 Feb 26 18:51 Metadata
-rwxr-xr-x      1 username  staff          0 Dec  7  2017 OfflineDeletedItems.plist.lockfile
-rwxr-xr-x      1 username  staff          0 Dec  7  2017 Sync.lockfile
-rwxr-xr-x      1 username  staff          0 Dec  7  2017 SyncOperations.plist.lockfile

When I tried to use shell tools (ls, find), I did not get any result in time reasonable for interactive work (it was hours), regardless of disabling file sorting like ls -f (what [seems to help in case of other UNIX-like OSs](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/120077/the-ls-command-is-not-working-for-a-directory-with-a-huge-number-of-files)) etc. The ls process has grown to around 1GB in size and worked for HOURS before outputting any result. My question is - am I missing some tricky option to have this working reasonably for large directories (outputting the results on the way, eg. to process further, filter etc.) or these tools are just not written to scale? Or maybe there are better file/directory utilities for MacOSX? (I haven't tried any GUI app on that directory, thinking better not to...). I have written a fairly trivial C program reading the directory entries and outputting the info on the way:

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

int main( const int argc,
	      const char * const * argv )
{
    const char * const dirpath = argv[ 1 ];
    DIR * const dirp = opendir( dirpath );
    if ( dirp == NULL )
	    return -1;

    int count = 0;
    struct stat statbuf;

    for ( struct dirent * entry = readdir( dirp );
	      entry != NULL;
	      entry = readdir( dirp ), count++ )
    {
       char filepath[ PATH_MAX + 1 ];
       memset( filepath, 0, PATH_MAX );
       strncat( filepath, dirpath, PATH_MAX );
       strncat( filepath, "/", PATH_MAX );
       strncat( filepath, entry->d_name, PATH_MAX );
       stat( filepath, &statbuf );
       printf( "%s %llu\n", entry->d_name, statbuf.st_size );
    }
    closedir( dirp );
    printf( "%d", count );

    return 0;
}

which actually does work (outputs the result after reading each entry) and has memory footprint of around 300K. So it is not a problem of the OS (filesystem, driver, standard library or whatever), but the tools which basically do not scale well (I know they support more options etc., but for a basic directory listing, without sorting or anything fancy ls should work better, ie. not allocate 1GB of memory, while find should do the action for each entry it finds (and matches), not read them all first, as it apparently does...). Has anyone experienced this and has a good solution how to deal with such huge directories (what utilities to use) on MacOSX? (Or maybe writing some custom system utility is necessary in such case?) (It is an exceptional situation of course, occurred for the first time on my system - but the OS supports such large directories, and the basic shell tools should deal with them in a _reasonable_ way...) EDIT: Small fix in the program (the filepath was lacking '/').

I posted this in the Apple Discussions forums, but have yet to get an answer that applies to the depth of which this situation currently exists. My Mac's hard drive (running Mojave) suffered some corruption recently, and I found myself unable to boot into the system. I am able to boot into Recovery Mode, and my intent was to rescue the important data sitting in /Users/(my username), but to my surprise, the entire /Users/ folder is *just not there* when I try to access it via Terminal. Steps taken: 1. Boot into Recovery Mode. 2. Open up Terminal. 3. Navigate to /Volumes/(my OS drive name)/ 4. Type ls to see directory tree. I see every other folder I am expecting to see (I think), except for /Users/. It simply is not there. What I have tried: 1. Navigating to literally every partition and folder I can think of to find where /Users/ might be instead. 2. Doing "chflags nohidden" on the drive does nothing. 3. I don't believe I have FileVault on, so I don't think anything in that category would apply to my situation. I can only come up with two possible conclusions: 1. The hard drive corruption annihilated ONLY the /Users/ directory (unlikely, I assume???) 2. Recovery Mode is hiding /Users/ in a way that I cannot figure out, and this is apparently not documented anywhere on the internet. I have seen other sites/posts talking about /Users/ being hidden, but they were not referring to situations similar to mine, and were resolved with simple (somewhat obvious) steps. They were not like what I am experiencing. In the meantime, preparing for the worst, I have ordered an external drive enclosure so that I can pull the drive out of my computer and view its contents on another computer. I am very hesitant to reinstall MacOS right now, because IF /Users/ has been compromised in the corruption, I don't want to do anything further that will prevent it from being recovered somehow. In other words, I am trying not to write any new data to the drive at all. Thanks for any help or suggestions in advance.

I do not use the folders ~/{Downloads, Documents, Public} and so I remove them. But some Mac OS X process keeps recreating them. How can I disable the creation of these folders permanently? What process(es) are creating them? Note: I do download files, e.g. from Safari, but they then go to a different directory. Safari allows this to be customized, so why can't the default directory be erased? Note: I have run a crontab to delete these folders on a routine basis, however this is not a satisfactory solution especially since it needs to be run by root or an administrator.

I just noticed some strange behavior moving some folders of images off of a Macbook onto an ExFAT formatted SD card. The folder appeared to have been moved off the source folder on the Macbook's SSD card and transferred to the SD card, however the folder in the destination folder on the SD card shows up greyed out on Finder and I cannot open it. Look at the image below, for folder date 2024-12-30 I had made 2 additional copies. copy 2 I used drag and drop while holding the command key down to initiate a move operation in *Finder* with the mouse. It was removed from the source folder import and moved to the destination folder txf_from_mac. Notice how in Finder the folder is greyed out and without a tree collapsible widget to expand the folder. Notice how with the first copy which I copy and pasted to txf_from_mac, the folder did copy over and is openable and can be expanded to see the folder content. The folder copy 2 however can be right clicked to view the Get Info panel on the folder, which shows the folder as having Zero KB. Here is a side by side of the Get Info presentation for each folder in the destination drive There seems to be a mismatch for the capacity on disk whereas the Size attribute is interestingly enough identical for both folders. This behavior has reproduced for two different ExFAT devices, one an SD card, and another a USB thumb drive. Is this a known bug in MacOS (I'm running Sequoia 15.5 (24F74))? What could account for this behavior? --------- sidenote probing around the folders in terminal the folder does appear navigable, and I can even copy the file to another folder and open it and find no difference in the image.

userX@MacBookPro ~ % ls '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/'                  
2024-12-30 () copy	2024-12-30 () copy 2

userX@MacBookPro ~ % find '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/'                    
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2/IMG_7302.JPG
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2/._IMG_7302.JPG
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy/IMG_7302.JPG
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy/._IMG_7302.JPG

userX@MacBookPro ~ % ls -la '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2'
total 11264
drwx------  1 userX  1950283502   131072 Jun  1 23:11 .
-rwx------  1 userX  1950283502     4096 Jun  1 23:11 ._IMG_7302.JPG
drwx------  1 userX  1950283502   131072 Jun  1 23:11 ..
-rwx------@ 1 userX  1950283502  5267537 Jun  1 23:11 IMG_7302.JPG

userX@MacBookPro ~ % ls -la '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy'  
total 11264
drwx------  1 userX  1950283502   131072 Jun  1 23:06 .
-rwx------  1 userX  1950283502     4096 Jun  1 23:15 ._IMG_7302.JPG
drwx------  1 userX  1950283502   131072 Jun  1 23:11 ..
-rwx------@ 1 userX  1950283502  5267537 Dec 30 14:07 IMG_7302.JPG

userX@MacBookPro ~ % cp '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2/IMG_7302.JPG' ~        
userX@MacBookPro ~ % ls -la ~/IMG_7302.JPG
-rwx------@ 1 userX  staff  5267537 Jun  1 23:50 /Users/userX/IMG_7302.JPG

----------- some additional context, after attempting to clean up my experiment by deleting the folders in txf_from_mac I hit an in use error > Some of the items you are moving are in use by another application. Moving the items can cause problems with the application using them. Are you sure you want to move these items? I tried to see if anything came up with an lsof command, grep filtered to some of the folder name (eg 2024-12-30 or "copy 2" but nothing came back. Clicking Continue did manage to successfully delete the folder however. The other folder in the destination folder deleted without issue.

On one of my MacBooks, a few iCloud folders have persistent iCloud status icons, even though there is no iCloud pie chart upload/download activity in the side bar. For example, they will show as being only in the cloud (i.e. cloud with down arrow) when they are definitely on my computer. Other folders have up and down arrows in the Finder Window Size column indicating something needs to be synced, but all the files in the folder are actually synced and have no incorrect cloud symbols. A few folders show the simple-line solid cloud icon which is normally only shown when iCloud status is clicked under View Options. On my other MacBook, everything is fine with no anomalous iCloud folder icons. Both computers are running Monterey 12.6 and have "Optimize Mac Storage" turned off. When I create/edit/delete files/folders, both inside and outside the anomalous folders, everything syncs fine between the computers. I have deleted the .DS_store files, checked for hidden files in the folders, rebooted the computer, run DiskUtility repair, but haven't found a solution. The only fix is to make a copy of the folder and after the copy syncs to iCloud, delete the original folder, and rename the copy to the original folder name. Unfortunately, this does not fix the problem for the enclosing folder(s), all of which still show the anomalous iCloud icon, so to ultimately fix all the anomalous folders at the top level requires hundreds of GB of syncing. This problem (and workaround solution) is similar to [iCloud Drive Preview folder shows persistent iCloud icon](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/427577/icloud-drive-preview-folder-shows-persistent-icloud-icon) , but is not specific to Preview. This is mostly just an irritation, but it does confuse me a bit when I am checking if an actual iCloud sync is complete. Is there some reset or cache clearance that could fix the problem when it occurs?

Can I insert an image or more than one image into a folder icon, (like overlaying the image onto the folder icon itself) so I can see some of the data that is in that folder before I click on it? I think I did this with Windows years ago and not sure which OS it was but can I do this in El Capitan and Yosemite?

I had a mid-2011, 2.5GHz, AMD graphics, Mac Mini with an SSD and HDD using OWC’s dual drive setup. The SSD drive had the OS (10.11 I think) and the HDD had my home folder and an old version of OS X (10.7 I think). I was running this setup for several years, with updates to the newer OS, with no permission issues. The computer had a logic board or GPU failure (wouldn’t boot, power light on, no chime, blank screen, the fan immediately revs to full speed) so I purchased a replacement Mac Mini with the same specs and moved the two drives to the new machine. The new machine will not boot as intended. When I try to boot normally, the computer gets to the Apple logo and the spinning icon for a half second before shutting off. When I boot from a USB installation disk, I can get to Disk Utility, etc. The Startup Disk options screen does not show an OS on the SSD, only the HDD. Everything shows “OK” when running First Aid on SSD. Running First Aid on the HDD shows a permissions problem that may prohibit booting. Using **Verify** in the menu I can navigate the contents of the HDD but nothing for the SSD. A couple of places on the web have recommended creating a backup home folder on the SSD boot drive when creating the dual SSD/HDD setup, in case of permission errors or directory corruption, but they don’t explain what the consequences are or how to fix it if you haven’t done this and run into problems. I can’t remember if I created the backup home folder on the SSD. So, what is keeping my Mac Mini from booting? Is there a corrupt directory or disk permissions gone haywire? If the problems involve my home folder, is there a way to create a new home folder on the SSD to make the drive bootable and then point the OS to the correct home folder on the HDD, all without overwriting anything currently on the SSD? I have a feeling I’ll be mucking about in the Terminal.

Apart from this topic which offers a small variety of code scripts to use on Terminal, I thought using available apps would be more user-friendly. The Finder in macOS can rename multiple files only if they are under the same directory as described in the "[Rename files, folders, and disks on Mac](https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/rename-files-folders-and-disks-on-mac-mchlp1144/13.0/mac/13.0) " Apple support webpage but I would like to rename files in different directories. Is this possible without command line skills?

I'm running 10.10.4, and can't seem to be able to change the generic folder icon. I've tried going into /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ replacing the icon there but it made no change. Then I tried the app Liteicon and it just made the generic folder icon disappear. Does anyone know how to change it?

How can I select a JPEG image and use that to customise/replace the usual blue folder icon for a given folder (which additionally may even make it easier to tell folders apart, when looking for one)? If this can be achieved without the use of a specific App, then all the better.

I have a certain PNG I'd like to replace a folder icon with. I noticed that when i Command-I this .png file, it will preview on the bottom, but not on the top left part (generic ".png" text appears instead). I also noticed that only images that DO appear on the top left side of the "Get Info" window can be successfully Command-C'ed + Command-V'ed into my target folders' "Get Info" top left area - so that the image is replaced. My question: is there some kind of standard for images that makes or breaks their compatibility with changing a folder's icon?

When I compress a folder or file by right click menu of Mac OS X, the archived file contains **.DS_Store** and **__MACOSX** folders. Because I share the archived file online for download, Windows users mistakenly trying to search the file in **__MACOSX** folder. I need to have a cleaner archive option. I do not want to include **.DS_Store** and **__MACOSX** folder, but only the file or folder into the archive file. All I found is [**CleanArchiver**](http://www.sopht.jp/en/cleanarchiver/) but it is GUI application. It really takes time and I have lots of files to compress. I am looking for a solution by context menu if possible. Is there any solution that you can recommend for clean compressing?

I have an Apple M1 Mac mini (model Z12N00038CZ/A) with Ventura 13.5 (22G74) installed. It is my personal (private) computer, i.e. not issued to me by a company. A few days ago, the iCloud Desktop & Documents Folders option turned itself off and messed up the iCloud folders in the Finder. Then, multiple Documents folder shortcuts have appeared in the Finder sidebar as can be seen in the first screenshot below. When I try to enable iCloud Desktop & Documents Folders now, the slider always returns to the off position as shown in the second screenshot below. I have tried logging out and in normally as well as restarting and logging in under the safe mode.

I followed the instructions included within the article below to create a Apple Automation to set the Finder Views for Folders and Sub-Folders. I added a hard drive as the top folder item. After the workflow was completed I checked several sub-folders on of the hard drive, but none of these were set according to the Workflow. Is this not working because the top folder item is a hard drive? Is this not working because I am using OS 10.13.6? https://www.lifewire.com/set-finder-views-for-folders-and-subfolders-2260912

I use Notes on my iPhone, iPad and Macbook Pro. Of late, the gmail syncing has been unreliable. I want to move all my gmails notes to the iCloud folder. There doesn't seem to be a way to 'move' a note, apart from deleting and recreating it. My question is: **How can I move my notes from one folder (gmail) to another (iCloud)?**