How to create a toggle hidden file button

Question

I am trying to create a service in automator that helps me make a file/folder hidden or unhidden.

I am a very new beginner and do not know anything about automator and I have only tried putting different services together but I don't even know how they work.

I have tried the following and it is not working:

Get Selected Finder Items

Run Shell Script:

STATUS = chflags

for f in "$@"

  if [$STATUS = unhidden]

  then

    chflags hidden

  else

    chflags unhidden

  fi

    killall Finder

Answer 1

You’re not all that far off: your main difficulty is how to test for whether or not the file is currently hidden. (Though your bash syntax is wrong, and a Finder-based service to toggle visibility only half makes sense -- how are you going to select a file that’s invisible?) That said, this script will work [1], given that you’re running it with bash and passing the input as arguments:

for f in "$@"
do
    if ( ls -lO "$f" | grep -wq hidden )
    then
        chflags nohidden "$f"
    else
        chflags hidden "$f"
    fi
done

Killing the Finder afterwards is not necessary; it will notice changes to “hidden” automatically. If you create an Automator “service” workflow, you don’t need the “Get Selected Finder Items” action at the beginning; your service will be passed the selected items as input.

[1] Mostly. It won’t work correctly on files that have “hidden” in their name. Fixing this, perhaps by using stat(1), is left as an exercise for the reader.