[X-Unix] Files Whose Names Begin With "."

Jerry Krinock jerry at ieee.org
Wed Nov 24 06:55:06 PST 2004


I have a wonderful new little MP3-player/bluetooth-headset/radio/dictaphone
pendant made in Hong Kong.  It is advertised to work on "Mac OS 9 or above",
but the developers literally don't know about OS X.

One minor problem I have is that when I write an audio file to it, it always
writes two files, for example:

MyAudioTrack.mp3    2000 KB  contains actual audio
._MyAudioTrack.mp3     4 KB  is useless

How can I remove the useless files?  As I found from experiment and by
reading "man rm", rm will not touch anything which begins with "."

>From doing a Google search I found a suggestion to use ftp to delete the
these files, but there must be an easier way!

Jerry Krinock
San Jose, CA USA

By the way, if I connect to an older Mac and boot into OS9, the OS9 Finder
will show and allow me to delete these files.  I believe that these folks in
Hong Kong may have used an old interface which supports OS9.  If anyone has
any sources for info on the broader issue of how to make this pendant work
better in OSX without kludges such as this, either for the developer or the
user, I'd appreciate that too!




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