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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I really wish OSes would stop using my filesystem as a dumping ground for rando metadata their developers keep generating and finding no other place for. Between .DS_Store, .Trash, desktop.ini (on Windows), and all these various "caches" garbage heaps they randomly dump into my directories, I feel I have less and less control over what I'm keeping on my own hard drive by default. A hard drive that I purchased, not some developer in Cupertino.

Yes, I know some of these can be turned off if you dig deep enough in settings, but the behavior should not be on by default.

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Given that people expect their folders in MacOS to leave things where they put them and the fact that .DS_Store files aren’t visible by default, I can’t agree with you.

It ensures that these settings carry over regardless of what actions you take on the directories and is low complexity. It seems much more preferable to me than a centralized database to track and maintain all the changes and is not portable.

I do think it should be an option to disable them, but to suggest that it shouldn’t be on by default is asinine. They’re serving the broader population, not grumpy nerds.

Storage is cheaper and faster than ever. How does this metadata affect you? You make it sound as if they’re *exploiting* your very important disk space for their own malicious purposes.

This content is there to store things like folder views, which for many people is pretty useful.

It’s unfortunate that they didn’t consult you prior to designing it like this, but they did offer the option of disabling it.

To disable .DS_Store files:

    defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

…of course, only on external disks.

Are internal disks likely to use a non-mac-native filesystem?

It's annoying for backing up directories or sharing directories between systems...

Then they would be external and the above solution would work?

No...

Use case is taking a copy (via say tar) of a directory hierarchy on a MacOS drive, and copying that to another system (Linux), and untarring... then you've got all the .DS_store files everywhere...

Not the end of the world, but annoying...

find . -type f -name .DS_Store -delete

I tend to do rm **/.DS_Store . I know it’s slow when there are lots of files, but it is still quicker than opening a man page or Stack Overflow to figure out what the hell the syntax is to do it with find.

Is that a meme like with `tar`?

Are there any downsides to doing this?

Downsides are if you access the network shares with finder it won’t maintain any appearance settings or where folders and files are “physically” placed.

I take little issue with .DS_Store because it's located where you expect. What I do have an issue with, are cached files that hide in folders that are unknown to me.

You mean like git repos or zip files?

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