Show system files / Show git ignore in osx

Question

By default it is not possible to see .gitignore files in osx. What is command to reveal these files?

Answer 1

In addition to the accepted answer, you can create an alias to easily show/hide the hidden files in Terminal. This is how I set it up (tested/working on macOS Mojave 10.14.1).

In my user directory I created a new file .custom_aliases and wrote this in:

# Show/hide files
alias showall='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true; killall Finder'
alias hideall='defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean false; killall Finder'

Next I opened .bash-profile (should also be in your user directory, if not just create it there) and added this to the top of the file:

# Load custom aliases
source ~/.custom_aliases

And that's it! Now whenever I need to view the hidden files I just type showall in Terminal and hideall when I'm done. You could also define the aliases directly in the .bash_profile, but I have some other stuff so I like to keep all the aliases together in a separate file.