Disable creation of .AppleDouble files on Mac OS X
Given that Macs support multiple forks to files, the AppleDouble trick (._ files) try to preserve the data in those forks. So they are needed so that Mac OS X can perform operations on them.
However, most of the files are created when the same volume is mounted through AFP, not SMB/CIFS or NFS. In that case, the AFP server might have configuration options for dealing with the Apple Double files (see, for instance, this blog post).
In order to get rid of AppleDouble files, you can on a Mac the dot_clean command:
dot_clean --keep=dotbar /Volumes/mounted_smb_volume
where mounted_smb_volume would be the name of the mounted volume.
You could add it to a crontab entry, or better yet, use something like Lingon X to create a launchd entry.
- Open Terminal.
- Execute this command:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
- Either restart the computer or log out and back in to the user account.
If you want to prevent .DS_Store file creation for other users on the same computer, log in to each user account and perform the steps above—or distribute a copy of the newly modified com.apple.desktopservices.plist file to the ~/Library/Preferences folder of other user accounts.