Disable creation of .AppleDouble files on Mac OS X

Is there a way to disable the creation of .AppleDouble files in Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) on non-HFS filesystems (such as SMB or NFS network shares etc...) ?

Solution 1:

Given that Macs support multiple forks to files, the AppleDouble trick (._ files) try to preserve the data in those forks. So they are needed so that Mac OS X can perform operations on them.

However, most of the files are created when the same volume is mounted through AFP, not SMB/CIFS or NFS. In that case, the AFP server might have configuration options for dealing with the Apple Double files (see, for instance, this blog post).

In order to get rid of AppleDouble files, you can on a Mac the dot_clean command:

dot_clean --keep=dotbar /Volumes/mounted_smb_volume

where mounted_smb_volume would be the name of the mounted volume.

You could add it to a crontab entry, or better yet, use something like Lingon X to create a launchd entry.

Solution 2:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1629 tells me that this can be done via

To configure a Mac OS X user account so that .DS_Store files are not created when interacting with a remote file server using the Finder, follow the steps below:

Note: This will affect the user's interactions with SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, and WebDAV servers.

Open Terminal.
Execute this command:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Either restart the computer or log out and back in to the user account.