Problem with Music Files on USB Drives

I designed it to be able to clean any usb stick, not just the “default” one. The first part gets the name of the drive you had selected. If no drive was selected, it uses the default name you entered. It can also handle multiple drives you select.

rm "/Volumes/USB Music/.DS_Store"

That needs to go before you eject it.

-m deletes the metadata files instead of trying to merge them which can’t be done on that file system. Apple stores the metadata with the file. On file systems that can’t do that, it splits them out as ._ files. If you copy back to a Mac file system, it would automatically merge them into the copied file.

I asked the moderators to delete my bad command post and they deleted a lot more.

To recursively delete the .DS_Store files, you have to use find with the -delete option.

find "/Volumes/USB Music/" -name '.DS_Store' -type f -delete

What did they delete? I cannot tell from what is left.

I had a post with a scrap of a command which would have deleted the contents of the USB stick. Using the command line can be dangerous. You can be half-way through typing a command and accidentally hit return. Sometimes, that can do destructive things.

I think you had a comment about the app being able to recursively delete the .DS_Store files.

I'm not sure there was any more than that.

elcpu wrote:

Many thanks. I can follow your logic above except the drag and drop of the USB drive icon into Terminal. I have not done that before and I am not sure how.

The shortcut I already got deletes all the ._ files and that removes the problem. The shortcut is a Terminal script:

dot_clean -m "/Volumes/USB MUSIC"

diskutil eject "USB MUSIC”

You don't need to do it the long way. I probably should use dot_clean -m.

The drag-and-drop thing is a useful feature of Terminal that helps with the need to escape, or quote, special characters in file names and directory names. If you drag a file, folder, or volume icon from the Desktop or a Finder window to the Terminal window, and drop it there, Terminal will paste in the file, directory, or volume path name, at the current text insertion point. Complete with any characters needed to make the shell recognize the name as being a single argument.

For instance, if you had Finder { Preferences / Settings } configured to show flash drive icons on the Desktop, you could type dot_clean -m in the Terminal window, add a space after that, and drag your drive's icon to the window. I think the command line would then show something like

$ dot_clean -m /Volumes/USB\ MUSIC

As far as the shell is concerned, this would be equivalent to

$ dot_clean -m "/Volumes/USB MUSIC"

Double-quotes around the whole string, or escape (\) characters in front of particular characters that would pose an issue, serve the same purpose.

elcpu wrote:

Servant of Cats wrote:

For instance, if you had Finder { Preferences / Settings } configured to show flash drive icons on the Desktop, [I do]<< you could type dot_clean -m in the Terminal window, add a space after that, and drag your drive's icon to the window. I think the command line would then show something like

$ dot_clean -m /Volumes/USB\ MUSIC

It did just that but why the $ sign above? What does the $ mean?

That's just part of the prompt, to let you know that the shell is waiting for you to type in another command. The bash shell ("Bourne Again Shell"; the name is a pun) uses "$"; other shells like csh might use "%".

The part in front of the "$" or "%" where it shows you the name of your Mac, and the current directory, is done using stuff in the default shell initialization scripts that customizes the prompt.

Back in the days when text terminals ruled, many power users would have objected to having "John-Does-Mac" take up space on every command line. They might have gone with something as minimal as just the "$" or "%" (after all, you could always do a pwd to show the current directory).

elcpu wrote:

Servant of Cats wrote:

That's just part of the prompt, to let you know that the shell is waiting for you to type in another command. The bash shell ("Bourne Again Shell"; the name is a pun) uses "$"; other shells like csh might use "%".

You lost me there... Care to elaborate?

I am using zsh because that is what Barney used, does it make any difference?

As to the pun … The original Unix shell was sh (shell). The Bourne shell was developed by a guy at Bell Labs whose last name was Bourne. ("Bourne Again shell" is to "shell" what "born again Christian" is to "Christian"; get it?).

bash used to be the default shell for macOS, but Apple stopped upgrading the version of bash they shipped with macOS … and in current versions of macOS, zsh is the default shell. The set of scripting commands you find in one shell may be a bit different from the set you find in another, which is one reason why some power users have strong preferences for one shell or another, and why you can change your default shell.

My version of macOS is old enough that bash is its default shell. But for what you're doing, if your default shell is zsh and you have a script that works with zsh, there isn't any reason to switch to another shell.

Mac to USB flash drive with hidden files to Mac isn’t where you see the problem. The Finder on the second Mac knows about, or does not care about, the hidden files.

Mac to USB flash drive with hidden files to some non-Apple device that does not understand what the hidden files contain is where you see the problem.