Unhide /etc dir but NOT using 'AppleShowAllFiles'. Possible?

Solution 1:

Enable ShowAllFiles one more time, long enough to drag /etc onto your Finder sidebar. From then on, /etc will be available in Finder and in Open and Save As dialogs, regardless of ShowAllFiles.

Solution 2:

On my system running Lion (10.7.4), the command sudo chflags -h nohidden /etc revealed the /etc folder at the top level of my hard drive.

The -h flag to chflags makes it act on a symbolic link rather than on the linked file.

The man page for chflags states "Unless the -H or -L options are given, chflags on a symbolic link always succeeds and has no effect." The behavior I observe when I run it is not consistent with this description: I very much do see an effect when I run chflags on this particular symlink.

If that solution doesn't work for you, or if you don't want to make /etc visible to all users on your system but you do want to easily navigate there in the Finder and in Open, Save, etc. dialog boxes, you could run a command like ln -s /etc ~/etc. That would create a (visible) symbolic link to the /etc directory in your home directory. When you double click it, it would open the /etc directory (actually the /Private/etc directory because /etc is a symlink thereto in OS X).

Solution 3:

I would like to be able to access this dir in Finder easily …

from within apps …

In Finder or any Open file… window, you can type:

• ⇧ shift⌘ commandG and type any directory you want to go to in that window, e.g. /etc, with auto-completion.
• ⇧ shift⌘ command. ¹ to toggle hide/unhide of any dotfiles or other hidden files, e.g. .zshrc, /etc. Then when you're done toggle it back—for Open file… dialogues it will reset after the window is closed.     ¹_{Works with macOS Sierra and later.}