Shared folders hidden from Finder on host machine

[filesINthecompu]

On my host machine I have two folders configured as Shared Folders in VMware Fusion to copy files to and from my virtual machines.

Recently I noticed that these folders became hidden to Finder - they didn't exist anywhere in the UI, making it difficult to drag and drop files into them.  Doing an 'ls' from Terminal verified that they still existed, though, and it was possible to have Finder go into these folders via 'Go' -> 'Go to Folder...' and specifying the path.

Digging into the cause, it looks like these two folders were given an extended attribute that hides them from Finder.  Here's the output demonstrating this from one of the folders:

MacBookPro:Desktop extra$ ls -la@
...
drwxr-xr-x@  3 extra  staff          96 May 31 14:15 test
     com.apple.FinderInfo             32
...
MacBookPro:Desktop extra$ xattr -px com.apple.FinderInfo test
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Deleting the attribute makes the folder visible in Finder again:

MacBookPro:Desktop extra$ xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo test

Of the files on my Desktop, the two shared folders were the only ones that had this extended attribute added, which makes me think that VMware Fusion added this for some reason.

Has anyone observed this behavior before?  This seems like a bug, since hiding the shared folders on the host is counter to the intended purpose of shared folders (to allow for files to be easily copied between VMs and the host).

I've been using VMware Fusion Professional Version 10.1.1 (7520154)

[dariusd · Accepted solution]

Fusion doesn't set Shared Folders as hidden on the host by default, and I'm not immediately aware of any other reports of this happening.

Note though that Fusion can mark a folder as hidden (using the exact same com.apple.FinderInfo extended attribute as you've seen here) if the guest's view of the Shared Folder is changed to Hidden – e.g. in a Windows guest, use Windows Explorer to navigate to \\vmware-host\Shared Folders, then right-click on a shared folder entry, choose Properties, and then tick the Hidden checkbox, and then the corresponding folder on the macOS host will become hidden because Fusion adds the com.apple.FinderInfo extended attribute on that host folder to represent the "Hidden" attribute requested in the guest.

Is it possible that you (or some application or service running inside your virtual machine) set the Hidden attribute from inside the guest?

--

Darius

[filesINthecompu]

That explains it!  I ran malware in a Windows VM that attempts to make all folders on all network drives hidden (as part of a mechanism for spreading itself), and I had no idea that these changes would carry-over to the settings of the shared folders on the host.

I'm having a hard time envisioning a legitimate case in which you'd want a change in the visibility of a shared folder in the guest to result in changes to the visibility of the corresponding folder on the host... It seems to me like it'd be better to keep the settings on both sides separate, and if the user wants the host side of the shared folder to be hidden then he/she should make that change via the host OS (at least for the outer most folder).

Anyway, thanks for your help!