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 or higher. Finder and Spotlight will not display them.

This makes it easier to mark files as hidden system files. Warning: This does not encrypt, employ steganography, or any other file protecting feature. Instead, it merely tells MacOS to pretend that those files at certain locations are not there. The result is it acts like those files do not exist; and, since they are marked hidden it will not display them in Finder or Spotlight because it omits them from their index as a flag to ignore.

What is able to see them? Terminal apps, servers, etc. Basicly if an app does not use Finder to see the filesystem, then they find it.

Who is this meant for?

If you want to hide things without having to worry about important data being seen or deleted by accident then this might be for you. From adding a safegaurd for encryption keys to having sensetive data that you only want a server to see/access (not Finder) or maybe you only want data visible during certain times during the day.

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

Servers, such as, Media Servers, Apache, and Nginx.

Warning: 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:

Cloak
Terminal
macOS 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.