It’s been a long time since I had to use Windows servers, probably ten years and six operating system versions. Back then I dealt with Windows shares not as an admin, but a normal user. I ended up writing utilities in bash or Perl that would delete .DS_Store files and “dot underscore” files being written to Windows shares by Mac OS X. Now that I am again dealing with Windows shares (again, not as an admin) I thought I should dust off my old scripts (one of which is dated 2002.)
But it seems the world has changed in the last ten years, and now I can deal with “dot underbar” (the proper name) using dot_clean, which is built into Mac OS X. I’ll also be using dot_clean on DOS formatted thumb drives and SD cards that are going into other operating systems.
There’s still those pesky .DS_Store files, which I do not want littering any of the Windows shares at work. It seems you can prevent .DS_Store file creation on network volumes by using the following command:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
That should make for neater volumes and file shares when I move things around… Now if only I could deal with the other annoying Windows server stuff. Often I cannot rename or delete a file or folder on a Windows share. Sometimes I’ll try it from a Windows machine instead of from Mac OS X, and occasionally it will work, but often I’m only able to move all the files out of a folder and then can’t delete a folder. If I can rename an empty folder, I end up renaming it “delete me” but I still cannot delete them. Does everyone have these sort of Windows issues? (Again, I am not an admin, just a normal user.)
Sometimes I really miss of the Mac OS X-based servers I used to run. (Well, every time I have to use a Windows server, actually.)