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this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Blue Harvest for Mac will continually clean your removable drives of these files.
This seems like a bit of a scam:
On your external drives you can prevent the creation of .DS_Store
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteUSBStores -bool true
If you really want to continuously delete DS_Store from both your internal and external hard drives you can set up a cronjob:
15 1 * * * root find / -name '.DS_Store' -type f -delete
When I had a Mac, literally the first thing I did was set up a Hazel rule to delete every single .DS_Store in every folder.
…and whoever decided a file system should be case insensitive by default, I hate you.
The moment when you try to rename a folder in windows from Hello to hello and it doesn't work.
Yes, so annoying especially when using source control which is case sensitive.
Rename Hello hello2
Commit
Rename hello2 hello
Commit
Yes, that’s exactly what I do when I rename lol
What's the use case for case sensitive file names
On Mac when I rename a folder from “FOO” to “foo” git sees them as the same folder so no change is committed. In JavaScript I import a file from “foo” so locally that works. Commit my code and someone else pulls in my changes on their machine. But on their machine the folder is still “FOO” so importing from “foo” doesn’t work.
Well an uppercase ASCII char is a different char than its lowercase counterpart. I would argue that not differentiating between them is an arbitrary rule that doesn't make any sense, and in many cases, is more computationally difficult as it involves more comparisons and string manipulations (converting everything to lower case).
And the result is that you ultimately get files with visually distinct names, that aren't actually treated as distinct, and so there is a disconnect from how we process information and how the computer is doing it.
'A' != 'a', they are just as unequal as 'a' and 'b'
Edit: I would say the use case is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity, characters have meaning and capitalizing them has intent. Casing strategies are immensely prevalent in programming and carry a lot of weight for identifying programmers' intent (properties vs backing fields as an example) similar intent can be shown with file names.
Case insensitive handling protects end-users from doing "bad" things and confusion.
I work with a lot of users and a lot of files in my job.
I don't remember a single case, where someone had an issue because of upper- or lowercase confusions.
Most of my frustration comes from combining cases insensitive folders/files with git and then running my code on another machine. If you aren’t coding where you have hundreds of files that import other files, I could see this being a non issues.
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Like windows and their forbidden folder names
Simple solution: only allow lower case characters in file names.
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Think the other way around: What's the use case for case insensitive file names? Does it justify the effort and complexity for the filesystem and the programs to know the difference between lower and upper space chars?
What’s the use case for case insensitive file names?
Human comprehension.
Readme, readme, README, and ReadMe are not meaningfully different to the average user.
And for dorks like us - oh my god, tab completion, you know I mean Documents, just take the fucking d!
In case you or others reading this don't know: You can set bash's tab-completion to be case-insensitive by putting
set completion-ignore-case on
Into your .inputrc (or globally /etc/inputrc)
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For some extra fun, try interop between two systems that treat this differently. Create a SMB share on a Linux host, create a folder named TEST from a Windows client, then make Test, tEst, teSt, tesT, and test. Put a few different files in each folder on the Linux side, then try to manage ANY of it from the Windows client
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Every fucking folder in the file share has one of these
honestly - while a Mac is certainly less painful to use than winshit, putting rubbish files recursively into each(!!) accessed folder, on all thumbdrives ever inserted, that's something Jobs deserves to burn in hell for.
You'd want that, but a lot of programs do that, both in Windows and Linux.
e.g. The .directory files with the [Desktop Entry] spec by freedesktop.org
Dolphin has the option to enable/disable the feature
today I learned - using Linux at home since 2005ish and I have never had an auto-file generated on any USB attached drives of mine...
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FWIW Dolphin only does it if the filesystem doesn't provide a way to add that metadata directly to the directory and you change the view configuration for that directory away from your standard configuration. Which is how the standard describes to do it. (Some file managers incorrectly add those .directory files to every directory you visit.)
A mac will add a .DS_Store file to any directory just by breathing on it.
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Found one of these in the firmware zip file of my soundbar today.
See also: Let's roll our own .zip implementation that only Mac can reliably read for....reasons
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__MACOSX folders hither and yon.
Hmm.. Smells like a windows user aswell.. Look at that:
~~.desktop~~ desktop.ini
Edit: fixed the filename
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