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

[Phillip Burk]

On Nov 24, 2004, at 9:55 AM, Jerry Krinock wrote:

> 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

The filesystem of that little device doesn't grok resources forks.  the 
"._" file is a resource fork.

> 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 "."

Eh?  I'm able to rm dotfiles as either an admin user or prefaced with 
sudo.

You could try either forcing it:

rm -f "._whateverdotfile"

or use sudo and your admin password:

sudo rm -f "._whateverdotfile"

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