Q: Why doesn't Apple fix the ".DS_Store" bug?

The last update to Mountain Lion was 2 years ago. I'm pretty sure that no one at Apple is working on this.

I've had it recommended to me to try the "cp" command in the terminal, since it copies what it's supposed to without the oddities of the Finder interfering.

Try "man cp" in the terminal to get the proper usage of this command.

Hi Kurt I would like to tell you that it is not just a few people with this problem and that there is a lot of people complaining about this problem and it is a bug because I am getting this problem on a brand new MacBook Pro out of the box brought from a Apple Store. You can use terminal and type cp as a command and then drag and drop the file/folder into terminal and then drag and drop the drive where you want the file to be placed and that seems to be a work around until Apple get a fix.

Just where are you seeing all these reports of such a large percentage of users being effected and complaining? Some links would help.

Thanks

Pete

I have to agree with Peter. Is it a real issue for some users? I have no reason to believe it isn't, even though I never experienced it myself while using ML. But what to you is a lot? If you mean you can find a couple thousand such reports around the web, that's still less then .001% of the total number of Macs running ML.

Hi All -

I've been spending some time looking into this. The .DS_Store bug isn't anything related to folders, etc. It's a Finder bug and is due to the way you have chosen to display the sorting of your Finder folder, i.e.: Sort by Name, Sort by Date Created, etc.

Simply sort by Name in alphabetical order, where # is at the top and Z is at the bottom by clicking the "Name" column in the Finder window you're copying TO, and do your file/folder copy. You will not encounter the error.

Hope that helps.

@iHope: Hmm. It seemed to work for me.

Another alternative is, use a tool called OnyX. It has a .DS_Store cleaning function for specified folders and folders+all sub folders. I use it too when I have this issue pop up. Works great. Only problem is it crops up again once in a while. But then I just run the tool.

You might want to try running OnyX first, then stay with the Name sort. Might help.

/ gx

Running 10.9.2, have not had this issue with regular Time Machine backups, or with previous backups to another external HD.  However, when copying to a just purchased, mac formatted WD 3.0TB drive, this issue arose on one set of files in a 1.7Gb folder which contained many other nested folders.  Strange that other, even larger folders with nested folders such as Library, Photos, Movies, etc. all continued to copy unaffected by this problem/error message.  As an aside, the folder stopped about halfway through each time before displaying the .DS_store error message.

However, just did the "set both Finder windows to column view" suggestion, and success! 

I did not try the sort by Name fix, but perhaps that is a similar result of the copy process not getting hung up on a possible sorting/display issue?  I don't see any of my file names starting with a space or character, so still not clear on how/why/which file in the1.7Gb batch would trigger this issue.

Another occurrence of the dreaded ".DS_Store" bug on my iMac 27" 2010 running Maverick (10.9.5)

No trick helped from what others were suggesting (name sorting or column view).

Apple, are you listening?

Apple are not here.

Pete

Apple is putting no time or resources into Mountain Lion. The fix is to upgrade to a newer version of OS X.

after reading this thread I must add that it is still happening. I'm running 10.11.5 El Cap on a 2012 MBP and it always happens when I'm backing up blocks of files from one drive to another. I'm using G-Tech external drives that were formatted last year.

It seems to have no pattern because a folder that errors out when included with another larger set will often copy just fine by itself. It's a huge pain that when backing up large numbers of files, Hundreds of gigabytes of data.

I have to go in, find the last folder copied and do it by itself. Then try the next batch until it happens again. Instead of taking an hour or two to back the files up, it can take days. I'm certainly not going to go in and change the sorting order of hundreds of folders hoping to make this stop. And from the sounds of it, that doesn't always work.

I saw an Adobe post that the .DS_store files should be routinely deleted in Terminal because they are a security hole in the system. I don't take that seriously but I'm guessing that forcing the system to rebuild them all would solve the problem... At the expense of resetting every folder to the default.

Thanks so much for your research, DaChavez! Sherlock would be jealous and would admit with grinding teeth "well done".

Made my day and blew away all the frustration with that.

Was avoiding certain folders because of that mysterious bug before. But now i can copy away without problem!

You are wonderful! Much obliged!

Greetings from Berlin.

I keep all my folders in Column view, and still have this problem. Also, I'm running 10.8.5.