Compressing folders on a mac, without the .DS_Store

Is there anyway to get rid of the .DS_Store when compressing a folder on a mac?

I work on a mac and send work to clients in zip format, but always get questioned on the .DS_Store folder inside them. It seems to be unavoidable unless I open the folder on Windows then delete the .DS_Store and compress it there. It is quite a big hassle.

Are there any easy work arounds?

If you do not mind jumping down in to terminal, then this is pretty darn easy. If you are in /Users/username, which is your $HOME directory and there is a subdirectory named foo that you want to zip but ignore all .DS_Store files, then do the following:

zip -r foo.zip foo -x "*.DS_Store"

To interpret this, we are running the zip executable with the following parameters/arguments:

• -r for recursively including all directories underneath the targets we want to zip.
• foo.zip is the name of the zip archive we are creating
• foo is the target directory we want to zip up
• -x "*.DS_Store" excludes all files whose path ends in the string ".DS_Store"

No goofy third party applications needed nor do you need to trash your .DS_Store files at all - just rely on all of the unix tool goodness built right in to OSX / Darwin.

You can create an automator application that accepts a folder as input and produces a zip file of the folder contents without any cruft.

Store this application in /Users/you/Applications and then drag it into your finder toolbar. Then you can drag folders onto the app from any finder window.

Add 'get selected finder items' step. And also add a 'run shell script' step with the 'Pass input' option set to 'as arguments'.

The script:

name=("$@")
cd "$name"
zipFileName=`basename "$name"`
zip "${zipFileName}.zip" -r ./* \
    -x */.DS_Store \
    -x */.git \
    -x */.svn \
    -x */.idea \
    -X */__MACOSX
mv "${zipFileName}.zip" ../

Accepts a folder as input and produces a zipfile with the name of the folder.