Case of the disappearing desktop files.

Hey guys, sorry I've also placed this at the apple.discussions page but not getting any solutions. Just hoping that if more eyes see this the better chance of it happening already to one of those people. Here it goes.

Every time I drag a file or make a folder on to my desktop it disappears. It goes through the transfer process, blinks and then disappears. But it is there, because I can search my computer and it will show up in the search. But it also won't show under username-->Desktop either. Its almost like the desktop is treating my desktop files like system invisible files.

I've tried of course repairing permissions and restarting a few times. I tried creating a new user and it is NOT happening on that new account. But nothing seems to be working on MY account. Also I'm not sure if it matters but I'm running a bootcamp dual boot with Vista Premium and OSX 10.5.5.

Any ideas and help are greatly appreciated!

if you go into terminal and do a ls -la ~/Desktop

what shows?

That does tell me my files exist there. Including a pdf, an avi, and untitled folder i tried to create on the desktop which also disappears. Would code specifics be helpful?

P.S. thanks for the quick reply!

is there a . in front of the file name?

Nope, not in front of files I'm trying to see. There of course is infront of ds_store and localized but not in front of MY files. I'm assuming you're thinking that somehow my system is treating all of my desktop files as system invisible files as well. right?

That would explain why they aren't there But it doesn't sound like that's the case.

Do they look like this when you do a ls -al?


-rw-r--r--@ 1 mike staff 0 Dec 1 13:42 test.txt

do they have that @ behind the permissions? Does the directory?

it looks like this:

Macbook:~ AGuck$ ls -la ~Desktop
total 216
drwx---rwx+ 4 AGuck staff 136 Dec 1 10:55 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 22 AGuck staff 748 Nov 19 09:45 ..
-rw----rw-@ 1 AGuck staff 15364 Dec 1 10:55 .DS_Store
-rw----rw- 1 AGuck staff 0 Oct 9 2007 .localized
-r--r--r--@ 1 AGuck staff 76084 Dec 1 10:29 6810 FA 6x9 Folder 10-08.pdf
-rw-r--r--@ 1 AGuck staff 14445 Nov 8 14:00 Wedding.avi
drwxr-xr-x 2 AGuck staff 68 Nov 30 14:23 untitled folder

just figured it would be easier to show you the whole thing. Thanks so much for helping!

Ok, so they're hidden via attribute.

Do this.

SetFile -a v Wedding.avi
SetFile -a v "6810 FA 6x9 Folder 10-08.pdf"


see if they show then

currently getting:
-bash: SetFile: command not found

tried with and without quotes on file names

it's the SetFile bit. Let me see where it is on my system.

mikeMbp:~ mike$ which SetFile
/usr/bin/SetFile


I have development tools installed though.

Read this:

macosxhints.com - 10.4: Use SetFile utlity without Developer Tools install

ok I think I got that to work but now how do I change it so that every NEW file added to the desktop remains visible? Did I somehow screw up a preference?