dot_clean won't work "Bad Pathname: Operation not permitted Failed trying to change dir to .Trashes"

Which ones? There’s a couple things going on here and your answers are too vague figure out what the exact problem may be.

If you are trying to remove the Spotlight and Trash directories with dot_clean, it won’t work.

You could put together a Automator Quick Action that would remove those directories and run dot_clean to purge the metadata, but I think it might need admin privileges to remove Spotlight and Trash.

All of this is telling you is that it can’t access the spotlight and Trash directory.

Since that’s not a FAT or ExFAT volume, there should be no meta-data files to clean. What exactly are you trying to do?

Either put the whole path in quotes or escape the spaces

"/Volumes/my usb stick"
/Volumes/my\ usb\ stick

Easier, enter the command an leave a space, then drag the volume into the Terminal window:

dot_clean -mn 

If "my usb stick" has a .Trashes and a .Spotlight-v100, then there should be no need to clean it of extra metadata. The file system on the drive supports "embedded" metadata since it supports Spotlight.

Despite that error message, dot_clean does remove the dot underbar (._) files on a FAT32 volume.

I wasn’t aware Spotlight would index FAT or ExFAT, so I thought it was a Mac format.

As I tried to explain, and. Viking OSX clarified, it should be cleaning up the metadata, but it cannot do anything with the Spotlight or Trash directories.

Does it fail to remove the ._ files when you get those warnings?