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At work, we all use Macs, and have an SMB fileserver set up.

Somehow, weird hidden files have been popping up, particularly when syncing between our Macs and the fileserver. I don't what creates them and why they are created. For a file called index.html, a hidden file called .index.html gets created. Sometimes all the files in a folder have . equivalents, e.g. bear.jpg would also exists as a hidden file calld ._bear.jpg.

Now, these hidden files are not a problem, until you start copying folders, or do rar/zip operations, or work on a version control system. You don't want those hidden files to be cluttering up the system.

Who knows why these files are here, and possibly a command to get rid of these files from a folder recursively?

This is an example: the third file, ._index.html, was created by something, and I don't know what or why.

total 16
drwx------   7 wolfr  staff   238 Dec  9 13:34 .
drwx------   5 wolfr  staff   170 Dec  9 13:17 ..
-rwx------   1 wolfr  staff  4096 Dec  9 13:34 ._index.html
drwx------  14 wolfr  staff   476 Dec  9 13:27 css
drwx------   6 wolfr  staff   204 Dec  9 13:27 images
-rwx------@  1 wolfr  staff  3520 Dec  9 13:34 index.html
drwx------   4 wolfr  staff   136 Dec  9 13:27 js

This is a command I would use to delete .svn files recursively, how I modify it to remove files that match ._* recursively?

find . -type d -name '.svn' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rdf

EDIT: the command is, I guess

find . -name '._*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rdf

1 Answer 1

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That's MacOS storing its metadata. When its on a regular Mac (HFS) filesystem, these are stored in the file's properties by the filesystem itself. But in FAT or SMB there is no space reserved for this, so OS X works around it and creates the ._ file...

This command would recursively remove them:

find . -type f -name '._*' -delete
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  • +1: This is exactly what OSX does. There really isn't any way around it. Dec 9, 2009 at 15:19
  • Shouldn't there be an option to mount that turns this of?
    – Wim
    Dec 9, 2009 at 15:21
  • +1 Good explanation. Curious about a workaround too.
    – Maxwell
    Dec 9, 2009 at 16:57

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