Prevent .DS_Store Creation in OS X

October 12, 2006 · 16 comments

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

Tagged as: Apple, Asides, How To's

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{ 4 trackbacks }

Memoria de Acceso Aleatorio » Evitar la creaciÃ³n de archivos .DS_Store en servidores Windows: October 15, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Another great tip from Paul Stamatiou at Blomfeldt.eu: October 24, 2006 at 7:24 am
Prevent .DS_Store Creation in OS X | hadi’s blog: July 30, 2007 at 2:33 am
Memoria de Acceso Aleatorio » Truco: Evitar la creación de archivos .DS_Store en servidores Windows: August 1, 2008 at 12:59 pm

{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Ronald Heft October 12, 2006 at 10:50 pm: Thank you so much for this. This has been a huge problem with me connecting to PSU’s web storage.

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2 Amit Karmakar October 12, 2006 at 11:14 pm: Brilliant. I have been looking for this for a while… will come in handy!! Thanks Paul.

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3 Constantinos Kouloumbris October 13, 2006 at 5:38 am: Nice, cool tip. I will put it in my thing to do when I reinstall the OS X.

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4 Rafael Fischmann October 13, 2006 at 7:29 am: Onyx already does that for a while now:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/onyx.html

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5 Andrew Swihart October 13, 2006 at 8:37 am: 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?

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6 Dustin Bachrach October 13, 2006 at 7:14 pm: Hey, great tip!

I was wondering if anyone knows of any side effects to doing this?

Thanks

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7 Blake Brannon October 13, 2006 at 9:17 pm: Pure Sweetness!!

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8 Kyle Korleski October 13, 2006 at 10:47 pm: Already applied to OS X, thanks Paul!

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9 Mads October 14, 2006 at 6:24 am: 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.

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10 Billytheradponi (Nick Barrett) October 16, 2006 at 1:45 pm: At last, a solution! Thanks for the link :D

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11 Scott Schiller October 17, 2006 at 10:45 am: 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.

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12 Innovation January 30, 2008 at 12:22 pm: 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.

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