.DS_Store

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Level 1

8 points

.DS_Store

A document named .DS_Store appeared a few months ago. The name starts with a period. .DS_Store. It shows up as you see in this screenshot at the top of everything I do. You can see it is grayed out. I want to know what it is and how I got it and can I get rid of it. What is it doing? I put it on my desktop to get info.

( for the subject of this post it says ......mac with os windows ntclienttip I did not type that. what is mac with windows ntclienttip?) I ask because I think I remember reading that things that start with a "." are windows files and I dont have a windows system on my mac.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Sep 28, 2016 6:04 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 28, 2016 10:24 PM in response to shahamus

Have a look at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store

These files are normal in macos.

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Answer 2

Sep 29, 2016 2:27 AM in response to shahamus

Files on a Mac beginning with a full stop use the full stop to make them 'invisible' in normal use. You have enabled the displaying of invisible files and such files are then showed greyed out to signify that.

As Peter said this particular file is a perfectly normal file on a Mac and in fact one of these is normally created in every single folder on a Mac drive including network server stored folders.

This file will store various settings relating to the folder like whether it is displayed as a list or in icon view, the sort order, etc. This particular file will show up to Windows users on the same file server and this is where most confusion and complaints arise although the presence or absence of this file will not cause any problems to Macs or Windows.

As per Mac OS X v10.4 and later: How to prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections - Apple Support it is possible or was possible to turn off the use of this file on network volumes but not for local volumes.

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