Automating the cleaning of macOS-specific ( ._ and .DS_Store) files on Eject | Hacker News Reader

Automating the cleaning of macOS-specific ( ._ and .DS_Store) files on Eject

blog.gingerbeardman.com

41 pointszdw23 comments

Huh, macOS includes a utility called `dot_clean`. It's just been sitting there, quietly, in `/usr/sbin` for decades waiting for me to discover.

I've been using macOS since it was OS X and thought I knew most of its nooks and crannies. Today I learned a new one.

When I was first introduced to Unix in the mid-90s, one of the things I did was to poke around all the bin dirs, see what was there, read most of the man pages. I'm not sure I ever bothered to do that on OS X. Maybe it's time.

For whatever reason both macos and freebsd have this effect. So many useful, mystery binaries.

Macos does sometime ship cool cli tools deep in the built in Apps which makes discovery harder.

Very, very nice and helpful! I probably wouldn't do it exactly this way on my system, but it's always good to see other approaches to this annoying and entirely unnecessary problem. One of my biggest pet peeves about macOS is its tendency to leave its "droppings" all over my SD Card filesystems and network shares, and I'm constantly searching for a nice clean, transparent way to fix this bug since Apple seems to have no intention of doing it themselves. So rude to be using my filesystem as their personal dumping ground for crap.

I would add ".fseventsd" and ".Spotlight-V100" folders to the cleanup targets, too.

Try:

   touch "${vol}/.metadata_never_index"
   touch "${vol}/.fseventsd/no_log"

First one stops Spotlight. After creating the stop file, the .Spotlight-V100 directory can be removed.

Nice, but you've traded a garbage .directory for a garbage .file. The goal is zero garbage.

I don't mind a garbage hidden file/folder

(author here) I'm interested to know how you'd do it differently? Always interested to hear about new angles and approaches. Cheers!

I guess I'd rather do it as a LaunchAgent or some other way to do it periodically in the background.

But it only needs to be done once on eject. If you clean periodically the files will return in between.

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteUSBStores -bool TRUE

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE

Appears to work fine for me. No files created on network or usb storage.

Tried these so many times and they never seem to persist. Eventually, I'll start noticing the junk files coming back and lo and behold the defaults are no longer set.

Assuming you mean persist after OS upgrades/updates? As bad as OS updates overwriting user's settings, having them persist less time than that would be very disconcerting.

It's not always just "foreign" filesystems where it happens.

I hooked up my MBPro to my two Linux machines with Syncthing, and suddenly I had .DS_Store files in all my shares directories on both of those Linux machines.

I then had to set up .stignore files to ignore the further syncing of them and also had to iradicate the files manually.

My Syncthing shares were in my $HOME/Sync/ directory on my MBPro (M2), which should be the main drive mount as far as I'm aware?

Also: the way I discovered this was that one of the directories was the shared directory for my website blog (both source and target static-site generated files), and from my Linux machine I had r-synced that to my remote web server, and noticed bots had found these .DS_Store files in most directories of my website, which included (due to the .DS_Store files) unlinked files which the crawlers wouldn't have found if not for the .DS_Store files.

So I was then getting 200 HTTP requests on the .DS_Store files and I noticed that in my server logs, and then it occurred to me how they had got there (via Syncthing, and me not noticing them locally on the Linux machines until I looked for them and found them).

Did you try a filter like rsync's

--exclude=".*/"

Or an Apache regex config like:

    Order allow,deny

    Deny from all

</FilesMatch>

Or something like:

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?\.git+ - [R=404,L]

RedirectMatch 404 ^(.*/)?\.git+

Good luck =3

Why does apple still do this? Surely there's some other way they can implement whatever functionality these files provide? The collective number of man hours wasted on this issue is probably centuries by this point.

As far as I know, not in a way that’s portable across file systems. My understanding is these files persist information about the view of the directory. Things like icon positions, whether it is viewed as a list or as icons etc. All options are a tradeoff in some way.

You could persist it in a DB on the machine itself, but then every machine would have a different view and you might lose that between machines or on upgrades. The classic app icon + arrow image + applications folder alias with some basic text instructions in the window for installing an app via drag and drop (and for that matter sizing the window to have all of that nicely framed in view) is all in this data. A per-machine setting would mean app developers couldn’t store that data with the install image, or it would require disks themselves to be carriers of that data / special file systems for software install disk images.

Per file metadata a la the classic Mac resource fork is an option, but osx moved away from that precisely because only HFS supported it and other OSes and systems would silently drop the fork. Not a problem in a pre-interconnected computing world, but a huge problem in a world where your file might pass through multiple file systems on its way to you. That’s one of the reasons why classic Mac software archives still hold everything in .sit files, since that keeps the resource fork intact for the contents while being storable on non-HFS file systems.

And the choice they have gone with (per directory hidden files) has the downside of littering systems with misc files that other users don’t care about

Why does apple still do this?

It's been 20 years since I moved from Windows to Macintosh, and I still run occasionally run into Thumbs.db files.

But unlike Apple, Microsoft stopped using Thumbs.db in Vista, 18 years ago.

Probably for a reason similar to why Microsoft won't change this behaviour: "Zone.Identifier Files when downloading from Windows to WSL file structure" (https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7456)

I personally don't care, its just tiny files, Windows does similar with Thumbs.dll or whatever, I use git for important things which usually adds these files to my git ignore, but apparently sometimes these type of file leaks can lead to websites being hacked, since .DS_Store contains information about files in the current working directory, so if you say, upload a SQL script you use to migrate and it has a root password on it, an attacker might now know where that is on your web server.

Old hack back in 2009 iirc

Here's an article from 2010

https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/possible-security-i...

Here's one from 2021 where Microsoft leaked credentials:

https://cybernews.com/security/microsoft-vancouver-leaking-w...

(author here) I go into why I care in the blog post: the files cause various software and devices to misbehave in unfortunate ways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com