Cloak

Sometimes the best way to hide things are in plain sight. Cloak your files so that others will not use or stumble upon them during typical use of your Mac. With a simple command, mask your files or folders from being displayed on macOS X or 11. Finder and Spotlight will not display them.

This makes it easier to mark files and folders as hidden system files. This does not encrypt, employ steganography, or any other file protecting feature. Instead, it merely tells MacOS to pretend that those certain locations are not there. The result is it acts like those files and folders do not exist; and, since they are marked hidden it will not display them.

who is this meant for?

If you want to hide things from non-tech savvy people without having to worry about loosing access by forgetting a password or keeping safe encryption keys, then this program might be right for you.

I can not stress this enough: Cloak merely marks files and folders as hidden system files so that Finder (OS X's file manager) and Spotlight (the system search), omits them. Nothing more. This means that if your browse or search for a file or location you will not find it.

examples

Cloaking the test folder looks like this

bash-3.2$ cloak -c ./test/
 Cloaking ./test/ ...
 Removing ./test/ location from Spotlight's index...
bash-3.2$ 

Uncloaking the test folder looks like this

bash-3.2$ cloak -u ./test/
 Uncloaking ./test/ ...
 Adding ./test/ location to Spotlight's index...
bash-3.2$ 

usage

cloak <option> /location/to/file-OR-folder
-c --cloak location from Finder and Spotlight
-u --uncloak location from Finder and Spotlight
-s --show hidden system files
-i --invisible hides those system files
-v --version
-h --help

how to access hiden locations?

Any terminal programs can, which include the following:

cloak
ls
lsof
find
cd
mv
pwd
rm

Severs, such as, Plex Media Server, Apache, and Nginx can find and use locations, too.

If you hook the drive up to another machine it may be able to see those hidden locations without a terminal.

automate when things are findable

Set the task scheduler, known as, crontab to cloak and uncloak files and locations for set periods of time.

Once Cloak is installed, in a terminal create a new task

crontab -e 

Choose when you would like the job to run. Every job is a line in your crontab file. The first 5 arguments specify the time to run the job, and the 6th argument is the command to run.

Argument 1: Minute (0 - 59)
Argument 2: Hour (0 - 23)
Argument 3: Day of Month (1 - 31)
Argument 4: Month (1-12)
Argument 5: Day of Week (0 - 6) Sunday = 0
Argument 6: Command

Lets say you want to cloak your project folder that is on your Desktop while at work from 8:25am to 6pm Monday through Friday.

25/8/**/1-5 cloak -c /Users/your-account-name/Desktop/project

This means, cloak your project folder 25 minutes after the hour, on the 8th hr of the day, every day, every month, monday through friday

0/18/**/1-5 cloak -u /Users/your-account-name/Desktop/project

This means, uncloak your project folder 0 minutes after 6pm, every day, every month, Monday through Friday.

Save your crontab task file and it will be set. If you want to check to see what tasks are set to run and when type into a terminal

crontab -l

requirements

software:

Terminal
Mac OS X.5 or higher  

Setup

Automated command:

sudo ./install_cloak.sh

Manual commands:

cd ./cloak/
chmod +x ./cloak.sh
sudo cp ./cloak.sh /usr/bin/cloak

License

Cloak is copyleft 2013 under the GPL v2 or higher.