I've discovered that some directories on my localhost disappear (or are hidden) when they contain an htaccess file with the following line of code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
As soon as I comment that line out, save the file and refresh my browser - the directory reappears. I'm running a XAMPP server on my Mac OS 10.6.8 - not sure what other information would be helpful here. I've commented out and uncommented all other lines of code in the file and they don't affect this situation either way.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
Well a friend of mine helped me figure out this out and I'll post here for future searchers.
The problem was that AllowOverride was set to different things in different places - it was set to All in httpd.conf (correctly) but inside that file http-userdir.conf was included and inside THAT file, AllowOverride did not include Options.
So Apache saw the Options in the htaccess command and hid the entire directory - to punish me for doing something I wasn't allowed to do.
If you are in the same situation - CHECK THE LOGS here:
xamppfiles/logs/error_log
The log said exactly what was happening and why.