How do I get rid of ._file files?

Question

How do I get rid of ._file files?

I know that some of users do not see them in Finder, but they are there and they mess up media cards. While they are useful on Mac OS X, they are garbage interfering with other systems. Try media card and put into a device (e.g. electronic picture frame) when you copy files. There will be a lot of reprots: "unsupported format" on those files. Of course they are not media files, but Mac OS X metadata which is useless on other platforms.

Simply put do you know how to:

1. Avoid copying those files to media cards/drives/network locations? (any setting in config or else?)
2. Once it is copied how to get rid of them the easiest way (I mean is this possible without mocking shell script: for... ls -la...do ... rm... done e.t.c.)?

Thanks,
Maciek

PowerMac G4 (dual), Intel Core Duo Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.4.5), Dell 2005FPW, Logitech trackball, External DVD-ROM Region Free...

Posted on Nov 12, 2007 8:25 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 12, 2007 12:23 PM in response to Maciej Samsel

Personally I got some help in the Applescript forum and Niel came up with a great script to do what I wanted, namely strip the resource forks and the various dot files from a folder of things headed to a thumb drive and from there to my Windows box:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4537521

Unfortunately the forums' software introduced a format scheme that has wrecked posted Applescripts (the new formatting removed several slash / characters and replaced them with a carriage return). I put my copy of the script up here:

http://homepage.mac.com/francines/.Public/CopyStrip2Fat.zip

Download, unzip, then open it in Script editor and change the name of destination volume (it has my transfer thumb drive's name, /Volumes/FAT/items, meaning it puts the stripped things in a folder named "items" on a thumbdrive name "FAT"-- change that to what you are using).
Francine

Francine
Schwieder

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Answer 2

Nov 13, 2007 1:02 PM in response to Francine Schwieder

Hi Francine,

Thanks for this help. I am not new to shell scripting on UNIX, but very new to AppleScript. Perhaps this a good point of start to extend skills 😉

I will try the script even though I managed to do this with regular shell script run against my volume mount. I think a GUI tool that might be pointed to location to do this cleaning would be a good thing. Apple however should provide some tool to copy without those resource forks, databases and also allow to delete with that trash database for select locations (especially on external drives like media memory).

Thanks again,
Maciek

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