Skip to content
Table of GNU-to-BSD command differences on macOS: find -printf becomes find -ls or -exec stat; sed -i needs an empty ''; date -d becomes date -v or -j -f; stat -c becomes stat -f; with a note that brew install coreutils provides gdate, gstat, and greadlink.

Why Your Linux Commands Fail on macOS (BSD vs GNU)

macOS’s command-line tools come from BSD, not the GNU coreutils that ship with most Linux distributions. They cover the same ground, but their flags don’t always match — so a command copied straight from a… 
Dark terminal card headed Two ways to hide a file, showing ls -lO output where flagged.txt carries hidden in the file flags column while visible.txt carries a dash, and ls -ldO on the Library folder showing it also carries the hidden flag despite having no dot in its name, with labels reading a leading dot or the hidden flag and user name redacted

How to Show Hidden Files on a Mac

There is a keyboard shortcut that shows hidden files in the Finder immediately, and for most people that is the entire answer. What trips people up comes after: some files stay out of sight even…