Monday, October 13, 2008

Get rid of "._" files from Mac

The Mac seems to leave a lot of "._" files on windows disks (which was meeting with complaints from our network people). Terminal has a built in command to get rid of these:

dot_clean -m [disk name]

You can find the names of your disks by typing
mdutil -sa

For more info:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/dot_clean.1.html

Update:
Well, this seems to work on local drives but not network drives. I found a utility that (among other things) has a check box that deletes the files off the network and prevents them in the future: http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php

Update2:
Type this command in terminal so that OS X never saves ._DS files on network drives again
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Here's the apple page about this
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1629

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