Solving the mystery of OS X’s missing /Users folders

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You know that saying about someone being so smart that they've forgotten more about a certain subject than the average person has ever known? Much the same could be said for Apple and good ideas. While not every concept in the company's history have been winners, there are a good few we'd love to see Apple take another crack at revolutionizing -- whether it's because they're potential mass market winners, or just because we'd personally like them.Which ones made the grade? Check put the gallery above to find out.
You know that saying about someone being so smart that they've forgotten more about a certain subject than the average person has ever known? Much the same could be said for Apple and good ideas. While not every concept in the company's history have been winners, there are a good few we'd love to see Apple take another crack at revolutionizing -- whether it's because they're potential mass market winners, or just because we'd personally like them.

Which ones made the grade? Check put the gallery above to find out.


The majority of people who upgraded to OS X 10.9.3 yesterday noticed what seemed to be a strange glitch, in the form of their /Users and /Users/Shared folders disappearing. In fact, the fault doesn’t have to do with 10.9.3 at all, but rather occurs if you’ve updated to iTunes 11.2 and also have Find My Mac enabled.

Fortunately, there’s a workaround.

Launch Terminal (/Applications/Utilities), enter sudo chflags nohidden /Users, and then hit the Return key. Once this is done, you’ll be asked to enter your user password. Do this, hit Return again, and the Users folder will be visible again.

Unfortunately it’s a temporary solution, since the folders will disappear again when you reboot.

If you want both a visible Users folder and also an enabled Find My Mac (you greedy person!), here’s an additional fix. You’ll need to launch AppleScript Editor (/Applications/Utilities) and then enter the following:

tell application "Terminal"
do shell script "chflags nohidden /Users" password "yourpassword" with administrator privileges
end tell

Type your administrator’s password in place of “yourpassword,” then save the AppleScript as an application. Next launch System Preferences, select Users & Groups, click the Login Items tab, hit the plus (+) button that appears at the bottom of it, navigate to your saved AppleScript application, and then click Add. When you restart your Mac, it will run the script when the Mac logs in, thereby making the Users folder visible on Macs suffering from the problem.

However you slice it, hopefully Apple sorts this problem out soon.

Source: Macworld

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