Description

CleanOSXFiles is a simple Perl script to remove the annoying extra files written by Mac OS X's Finder into every directory - files such as .DS_Store and ._filename. These files are useful and invisible as long as you remain inside a Mac environment, but become useless and apparent when directory trees are exported into other operating systems, for example via tar. The script will recursively parse every subdirectory and clean it from the unnecessary files.

Please remember that, while the .DS_Store files are visible in Mac OS X, the ._filename files (one for every file) created by the Finder under certain conditions are a representation of a "resource fork" and will not be accessible by the script if run under Mac OS X. You will only be able to remove these files after having exported the directory structure to another operating system (for example, by tarring and untarring it), by running the script on the target machine.

Requirements

CleanOSXFiles requires a standard Perl installation.

Installation

Download the file and extract it in a temporary directory:

cd /tmp tar xvfz cleanosxfiles-1.0.tar.gz

then move the cleanosxfiles script into your favourite directory, and make it world-executable by typing

chmod 755 cleanosxfiles

Configuration

No configuration needs to be performed.

Usage

Just launch the script from the Linux command line or from a Mac OS X terminal.

The script takes as argument the starting directory - the root of the directory tree to be cleaned.

Optionally, before the argument, you can specify -n to execute a dry run: the script will tell you which files it would have deleted, but it will not actually delete them.

Examples:

cleanosxfiles /tmp/myfiles/ cleanosxfiles -n .

Download

Click here to download: