Unable to prevent .DS_Store & ._ files external drives Catalina

Question

Level 1

9 points

Unable to prevent .DS_Store & ._ files external drives Catalina

I seem to be unable to stop .DS_Store and ._ files from being created when copying files and folders to windows and google drives. I have tried the following terminal commands (with restarts) suggested with no luck.

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true

Does this no longer work with Catalina? I couldn't find any confirmed recent solutions.

Software like Blueharvest may work for the windows drive, but not for google drive.

I am using the windows drive (ExFAT) for GIS analysis on a virtual machine (VMware Fusion, Windows 10, Arc GIS) and it's extremely annoying to wade through all of the extra files.

The .DS_store files are also created when I upload to google drive for my collaborators. I then have to go through and delete them individually from every folder.

This is all very frustrating and inefficient. Does anyone have a solution besides purchasing a PC?

Thank you.

OS 10.15.5

Macbook Air 2017

1.8 GHz dual i5

8 GB ram

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jun 24, 2020 11:24 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,674 points

Jun 24, 2020 12:14 PM in response to B_Forester

When you access a mounted drive from the Finder, the .DS_Store file is written in every folder that you descend into. This is normal for the Finder, and there is no suppressing the .DS_Store file creation. This would not happen if you did everything in the Terminal application though. 😎

There is a tool included with macOS by the name of dot_clean. There is a man page for it in the Terminal, and it will recursively remove certain dot underbar files.

man dot_clean
/usr/sbin/dot_clean -m /Volumes/STUFF

I do this regularly with a USB stick named STUFF that has n-tuple folders on it.

Reply

Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,674 points

Jun 25, 2020 2:27 PM in response to B_Forester

In the Terminal, the following will present the man page for dot_clean which explains its switches:

man dot_clean

Reply

Answer 3

B_Forester Author

Level 1

9 points

Jun 25, 2020 2:18 PM in response to VikingOSX

VikingOSX-

Thanks for the reply.

Running dot_clean does in fact remove the ._* files from the drive, although I had to modify the command line to

"dot_clean /Volumes/ExFAT" for it to work. I'm a terminal novice, and I couldn't find what "-m" does. Don't know if that was the issue or that my path doesn't include my user name.

This still does not solve the .DS_Store file issue. I'll just have to keep manually removing them.

Reply