Tag: windows

Typically if I need to find a file while my Mac is connected to a network volume, I can easily search that volume using the Finder. This usually works well, and I can find what I need. This doesn’t work at all for the Windows shares I have to use at work.

It’s a full-on Windows environment at work, and everyone has a Windows machine on their desk. I’m the only one who uses a Mac as their primary computer. I do all my own support, which is fine. I just have to find my own workarounds sometimes.

Since I often have to look through one of the Windows shares for old files, I’m stuck browsing since I cannot search, so I originally went into the terminal and did a ls -laR and dumped it to a file so I could easily search for specific files. This sort of worked, but since the listing via ls lists the directory and then all the files in the directory, I had to look at more than a single line of text to find the path to the file I wanted.

I then found the power of combining find with $PWD for find $PWD. This allowed me to list every single file on the Windows share, and dump it all to a file (which is 18MB) that I can easily grep in about a second.

The file’s information isn’t real-time, but I’m typically not looking for new files, but old files that someone else created years ago. I can always refresh my local store every week or so.

If I need to find every Arduino sketch, it’s now as easy as egrep -i '\.ino' ~/WindowsShare.txt

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.)