Why does Mac OS X create a hidden file for every file that is saved?
I tried searching for an answer to this question on Google, but unfortunately I got a bunch of results about how to view hidden files in Mac OS X.
I’m no Mac expert and maybe some Mac enthusiast can convince me otherwise. But isn’t it absolutely absurd to create a hidden file for every file saved on a Mac? Specifically, I’m talking about the stuff I’m seeing in our Samba shared drive here in the office. Anything saved to that shared drive from a mac, also puts a hidden file with essentially the same name as the original file, but with a dot-underscore (._) before it. And of course, since I’m on Windows this becomes very annoying because if I remove the real file, the hidden file is left behind and after a lot of usage these hidden—seemingly useless—files pile up. Where’s The Fire??
I assume it has something to do with file association, but isn’t Apple smarter than that? Is there a way to turn this off?
Subscribe to
Yeah, they can be annoying on non-Mac machines. We bought a tool from this website to prevent our Mac users from writing these invisible files to our non-Mac servers:
http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest/#faq
google ‘disable DS_store’ gave this:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301711
I believe the reason relates to the fact that legacy Mac OS systems used a dual fork fiel system where each data file also had an associated metafile containing info like filetype and creator. Since Windows machines don’t support this dual fork system, Apple has moved away from using resource forks so as to make documents work better across platforms, but they still need this data in order to enance the Mac desktop experience (if you save a file without an extention, the Mac still knows what application should open it, etc) and for this reason the data is saves in an invisible file. The files are tiny and harmless, so there’s really no performance penalty - they just make your directory look a bit untidy.
the spambots got you..!
Thanks! I removed them.