Editing the hosts file in Mac OS X

One of the first things I needed to do when I got my Mac is to edit the hosts file on it. To do this you need to open a new Finder window, click Shift + Command + G and type in ‘/etc’ without the quotes.

There will be a file in the resulting finder window called ‘hosts‘, this is the file you want to modify. However, I found that I didn’t have sufficient privileges to edit the file. You need to right-click (on my laptop it’s tap with two fingers) and go to ‘Get Info’, then in there under ‘Sharing & Permissions’ you need to add your user using the plus + button and then give yourself Read & Write access. After that you can edit the file.