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Remove annoying OS X DS_Store folders

Terminal - Remove annoying OS X DS_Store folders
find . -name .DS_Store -exec rm {} \;
2009-03-09 13:59:30
User: Svish
Functions: find rm
2
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Remove annoying OS X DS_Store folders

Recursively removes all those hidden .DS_Store folders starting in current working directory.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

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What others think

If you end it with \; then it runs rm separately for every file, which is unnecessary, so instead try

find . -name .DS_Store -exec rm {} +

That will make all the files as arguments to one rm command (or as many as your shell can handle) e.g. rm ./.DS_Store ./subfolder/.DS_Store ./path/to/.DS_Store ...

It's slightly easier on the system, and will run a bit faster for folders that have a lot of sub-folders with lots of .DS_Store files.

Comment by goodevilgenius 223 weeks and 2 days ago

In this case, the -delete action will work just fine.

find . -name .DS_Store -delete
Comment by DEinspanjer 223 weeks and 2 days ago

thanks for extra info. will try those out the next time I get a mac littered folder sent to me, hehe =)

Comment by Svish 223 weeks and 2 days ago

Before people go randomly deleting their .DS_store directories, it's worth knowing why the folder is there to begin with, and what its purpose it.

.DS_store directories are created every time you access a folder on your machine. It stores the position of icons, background image if any, and other attributes. Deleting this hidden directory means losing those customizations.

Also, next time you enter that folder, Mac OS X will recreate the .DS_store directory. So, you're just playing a cat and mouse game. Might as well learn how to use them appropriately rather than fight it.

Comment by atoponce 223 weeks ago

Yeah, it seems like the use-case for this is if you've just transferred a directory tree to a non-OSX unix machine and want to clean it up. I can't see wanting to run this directly on my Mac, though.

Comment by woxidu 220 weeks and 2 days ago

Well, this was in fact for when I moved to a non-Mac. But I have also experienced that those files have become corrupt so I needed to delete them and let the os remake them. In my case it was actually the per-file meta file that was corrupted, but with a minor tweak this line helped me then too.

find . -name ._* -exec rm {} \;
Comment by Svish 167 weeks ago

Your point of view

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