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

[James Bucanek]

Jerry Krinock wrote on Wednesday, November 24, 2004:

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

The '.._' file is the resource fork of the original file.  Since the file system of your device obviously doesn't support resource forks, OS X stores them as seperate files.  Any OS X application can still make use of the resource fork of the file even on filesystems that can't store resource forks natively.

>How can I remove the useless files?

It's not useless.

>As I found from experiment and by
>reading "man rm", rm will not touch anything which begins with "."

No, the *shell* normally ignores '.' files when doing wildcard expansion -- for obvious reasons.  But if you begin a wildcard with '.' or specify the file(s) explicitly, the filenames will get passed to the rm command.  rm will delete anything it has permission to.

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

There is.  Just leave the files alone.

-- 
James Bucanek <mailto:privatereply at gloaming.com>