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Comment by RubyPinch | Hacker News Reader

the system attribute is that better defense, changing explorer's options to display such files results in the following warning

https://i.imgur.com/uUaJEZI.png

if it was done via a VM, people would just mount the VHD, edit the files, and still complain

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Microsoft puts so many things behind this flag that you pretty much have to display all system files if you are a power user.

Totally disagree. I enable it on the rare occasions I need to and disable it immediately after I'm done doing what I need. This happens quite rarely (a few times a year) so, basically: no, I beg to differ.

Hmm... I'm not too sure about that. Any examples?

Show file extensions is disabled by default. I'll always go in and change that. But I can't think of a time where I've had to go into a system file before.

I've left the system files invisible at least since installing Windows 10, and it hasn't once been a problem. I can't remember if it was always this way, or if it's a recent addition, but there's a separate option for showing hidden files and folders. (With this ticked, system files remain hidden, so this one is a much easier tick to recommend, if you're technically-minded. You get to see %USERPROFILE%\AppData, which you'll probably want, but not stuff like hiberfil.sys and boot.ini, which you need much more rarely.)

My experience is that this was arguably true in the NT/9x days, wasn't really true in the XP days, and is quite false with Windows 7 onwards.

What exactly has caused you to need to unhide those files this decade?

Isn't Windows' hosts file located in a system folder? Not that I change it so often anymore, but when I did more web development, it was not uncommon for me to add a line there...

No, the "system32" folder is a normal folder from that perspective, i.e. it does not have the SYSTEM and HIDDEN attributes set.

Same for the "drivers" and "etc" sub-folders.

The registry hives are still system files, and so if you want to edit a particular user's registry, you need to show them.

Hidden files, sure. But system files? I can't see any reason to ever display them.

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