Prevent .DS_Store Creation in OS X
Dave from Jungle Disk pointed me to an Apple article for preventing .DS_Store file creation. These .DS_Store files are created multiple times when connecting to a remote file server, such as a SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS or WebDAV server. Although they are small and hidden, they can quickly get annoying when transferring files. For example, when sending things to my Amazon S3 account via Jungle Disk, transaction times are slowed down because there are so many extra .DS_Store files.
As the Apple doc states, simply execute the following line in your terminal and reboot.
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
Thank you so much for this. This has been a huge problem with me connecting to PSU’s web storage.
Brilliant. I have been looking for this for a while… will come in handy!! Thanks Paul.
Nice, cool tip. I will put it in my thing to do when I reinstall the OS X.
Onyx already does that for a while now:
http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/onyx.html
Maybe its cause I haven’t used Macs much, but this is the first Windows-like tweak I have seen for OS X, like changing a registry value. More to come?
Hey, great tip!
I was wondering if anyone knows of any side effects to doing this?
Thanks
Pure Sweetness!!
Already applied to OS X, thanks Paul!
yes that command really comes in handy when you’ve got network storage.. another terminal command I use a lot is:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
followed by
killall Finder (which “restarts” your Finder)
Comes in handy for finding those “secret” files, but also just when you want to clean up your hard drive.
At last, a solution! Thanks for the link :D
Thanks for the tip; my G4 cube would always write these files to Windows file (SMB) shares on my “ghetto dev server” (A celeron 433 in my closet), which I’d later see when working on my PC.
I can’t get this to work! I’ve typed it into terminal, copied/pasted from the apple site, even gone through other steps to copy the plist to preferences. STILL won’t work! What could I be doing wrong? I’m using terminal on Mac OS 10.4.11.