Hacking Darwin to remove .DS_Store

[aqsalter]

It might not seem like a big deal, but until I can use OS X without creating .DS_Store and other "." files in external directories I'm not going to use OS X at work. (Full-stop. I'm not going to create more work/hassle for my work collegues - they are already a little suspicious of Macs and then every network directory I touch creates "extra" useless files)

I'm wondering if anybody has heard of a hack to remove this (it could even remove it from the entire system, or I could disable it while I'm at work). I'm sure there is a way - I was even thinking about Unsanity APE which allows you to recode Cocoa API calls... Or hacking the source of Darwin (if that is where it resides)...

Let's kill this bug so we and many other people (link) can get on with using an (almost) otherwise perfect system...

Adam Q Salter

[jwalk76]

amen brother. i write code on my mac and then place it on my slackware server via samba. i'm getting really sick of having to clean out all of these files. other than .DS_Store, i also get a ._* equivalent of any file that i drag over (a samba issue, i believe), so in reality, transferring 20 files from my Mac creates 41 on the slackware box. i've been meaning to write a perl script to clean out the directories on command, but i never think of it when i have the time.

[scruffy]

I suspect it's the Finder that's doing this. In my ~/src directory, where the finder has never looked, there is no .DS_Store. My Desktop has both .DS_Store and .localized, neither of which I put there.

[michaelsanford]

I've been told that the ._* files is Windows' way of expressing the mac resource fork, which is why they appear. It's not Samba doing that, because I had a flash USB drive that I used with OS X and XP and I had those stupid ._* files everywhere too. It is a big pain, but I can't say whether it's Darwin or the Finder that does that, or some other middle-layer of the OS I don't even know about...

[jwalk76]

michaelsanford,

i am proud to say that i have never owned a machine with Micro$oft Window$. these ._* files appear on my Slackware Linux box when i transfer files via Samba. so, i guess it is a Mac-based problem but not specifically Samba or Window$ related. i guess i need to get cracking on my afore-mentioned cron/perl script to automate removal of these little annoyances...

[Tigger]

Originally posted by michaelsanford
I've been told that the ._* files is Windows' way of expressing the mac resource fork, which is why they appear.

As far as I know this is the way Mac OS X saves the Resource fork on File systems other than HFS/HFS+.

If you put files on a WebDAV server, it also saves these ._* files.

If you don't show invisible files on Windows, you won't see all these files, because at least Apple thought about hiding these little things. .DS_Store was visible till Mac OS 10.x, don't know which revision it was, but at some revision they hid it. This also has to be the revision that started encoding the resource fork as ._*

[michaelsanford]

Licht für dich?

[michaelsanford]

But on a serious note, the problem isn't so much that they are visible, it's that it clutters up a folder. So if you try to copy the folder, it copies these things too.

Hey actually it would be a simple matter to write an applescript to remove them...if you can mount windows volumes locally.