How to prevent .DS_Store file creation
Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks - February 3rd, 2010 - 5 Comments
.DS_Store files store folder level metadata information (such as icon placement and background pictures) for Mac OS X to understand, this is fine and dandy and you’re likely to never even notice if you’re a bunch of Macs working together. Unfortunately, these .DS_Store files can be really pesky in a multi-platform network environment, they can basically just lead to unnecessary filesystem clutter that Windows & Linux users receive no benefit from.
Thankfully, you can prevent the DS_Store files from being created entirely by executing a simple command in the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
This disables the creation of .DS_Store files for the user account the command was executed on. You can make this change to all user accounts manually by executing the same command under their login, or you can copy modified com.apple.desktopservices.plist file to the ~/Library/Preferences folder of each other user account.
Of course it’s not just Mac OS X that create files that are obnoxious for cross-platformers. The Windows equivalent to the DS_Store file is Thumbs.db, and if you’re a Mac in a largely Windows network, you’ll probably be running into these all the time. You can easily delete Thumbs.db files in Mac OS X by using Spotlight.
This only disables their creation on network drives. Not entirely.
Yeah, one of the most problematic occurrences of this for my is on USB flash drives. There is program called BlueHarvest that does a good job of deleting these .DS_Store files as well as other metadata files. It’s available at:
http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest/
Snow Leopard users beware! (10.6.2) I had previously activated this setting which prevent .ds_store files from being created on my work network and it caused my system to crash and the finder to lock up and hang. This occurred whenever I tried deleting files or folders (even if the folder was empty) when connected to our network — using the Samba (SMB) protocol and Windows Small Business Server 2003.
Addendum to my previous post: I anticipate this being fixed in the 10.6.3 release.
See the 10.6.3 Apple developer release notes:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Seed-Notes-Arrive-for-Mac-OS-X-10-6-3-Build-10D538-132974.shtml
thumbs.db do not store metadata but thumbnails to speed up displaying of icons upon revisit…only winxp creates this file…Windows Vista/7 store meta data and thumbnails in a centralized location