.DS_Store... How do I get rid of that?

.DS_Store files keep track of the window position, listing option and size. One for each folder window. Since the name starts with a period, you're not supposed to be able to see them. There are multiple ways to hide what are supposed to be hidden files on your Mac. Once of the easiest is with OnyX. Download and launch the app. Click on the Parameters button, then the Finder tab. At the bottom, turn off the check box to "Show hidden files and folders". If it's already off, turn it on. Wait a couple seconds, then turn it back off. Your files should now be properly hidden.

For further information about the functions of .DS_Store files, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store

That article also contains links to several other references.

Bottom line: you can remove .DS_Store files from your disk(s), but they'll be right back again: one in every folder you create, move or open. They occupy hardly any space and store useful information, and since you normally can't see them (at least not on a Mac), they're best ignored. On a PC they will always be visible, but can still be ignored. They can easily be deleted from a PC if for some reason it seems important to do so, and on a PC they won't be recreated.

You can have the Mac NOT create .DS_Store files on a PC connected over a network. There is a "hidden" Finder preference that can be enable using TinkerTool.

http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

In the Finder area of TinkerTool, check the checkbox for "Don't create hidden .DS_Store files over a network connection". The click the Relaunch Finder button.

TinkerTool obviously does more than just that one trick.

...and two more cents,

If you delete them, your Mac will take longer to start up, which incidentally is a demonstration of their usefulness.

If you delete them, your Mac will take longer to start up

By "them", I assume you mean .DS_Store files? If so, that's completely false. You can toss these files as often as you want. The OS will simply recreate them.

Yes I know they get recreated, as the above posts re-iterate, but if the .DS_Store is deleted from your User Desktop, which it would be if you deleted them all, it certainly will be recreated next time you restart, but that next restart takes slightly longer to do occur, because for that event, the .DS_Store is temporarily missing.

Normally I would let this slide, but the term 'completely false' annoyed me.

but the term 'completely false' annoyed me.

Sorry, roam. No malice was intended. It's just tough to word things so they read the way you want sometimes. Conversations by text only can make it very hard to get your emotion across the way you intend.

But I also have to apologize because I misread your post. You wrote, "your Mac will take longer to start up". Which is correct. I, for some dumb reason, first read it as, "your Mac will no longer start up". Don't ask me how I came up with that! :-P

That's cool Kurt. I agree text is an extremely one dimensional form. No wonder, Greek texts were more for the theatre than for reading.

I think when we are all hooked up to Skpye on VideoCams there will be a flowering of communication. I seriously anticipate that future as commonplace.

All the best, roam

Thanks to Kurt Lang the OnyX did the Trick for hiding the .Ds_Store file. I had them all over my document folders and now are gone.

Thanks Kurt.

Farshad

When I backup my music and photo jpg files to my external HD (ESP Wolverine), it not only create the .DS_Store file, every one of the files will have an alias file with a _ in front, eg. _07 Mary Pet.jpg with 50KB of memory. These files show error when I click on them. The real files are also there, so I can delete these alias files. But it becomes a hassle when I have hundred of files to back up, because I have to delete them one by one. Is there something I can disable in my iMac so these alias files won't be created when I back them up? Thanks in advance.

That means your external drive is formatted for DOS, FAT32. Those files starting with an a_ aren't aliases. They're the resource fork information for your Mac.

DOS formatted drives only have one way to write a file, as data. Macs have two. One fork for the data and a second for the resource fork information. When you write Mac files to a DOS drive, there is no resource fork to write that data to. To keep from losing that important information, OS X writes it as the a_ files you see. When you copy the larger data file back to your Mac, OS X automatically recombines it with the resource fork data stored in the a_ files.

So what you need to do is first copy all of your files on the external back to your Mac. Next, use Disk Utility to erase the external drive and reformat it as Mac OS Extended. Then copy all of your files back to the external drive.

I have already deleted all the a_ files in the external drive, so I assume there is no need to copy them back to the Mac and reformat. What can I do with the future files I'm going to back up to the external drive to avoid these a_ files to appear on the external drive? Thanks.

ckok: If you've deleted all the a_ files from the external drive, then when you copy the surviving files back to the Mac, many of them will be incomplete. What you threw away was some of the information that constituted your Mac files. Your backup is now substantially useless.

If you don't want to reformat the external drive in Mac OS Extended instead of FAT32 format as Kurt has advised, then a) don't use it to back up Mac files, or b) go ahead and back your Mac files up to it, but realize that each one will appear in the FAT32 filesystem as two files, and don't delete any of them.

As eww said, if you leave the drive as is, you will always get the a_ files with everything you copy to it from your Mac. The only way to avoid it in the future is to reformat the drive as Mac OS Extended.