Lately, I've been doing a lot of development on Mac. With that comes a lot of use of the Finder app.
In order keep your repo clean, you need to remove .DS_Store files from the folders created using the Mac GUI. Doing that by hand is really boring, painful, and repetitive. Enter that awesome thing we call the command line.
Recursively Remove .DS_Store
Open up Terminal
In the command line, type:
cd to/your/directory - then press enter.
Finally, in the command line, type:
find . -name '.DS_Store' -type f -delete - then press enter.
Warning: Never use a wildcard (*) with this command, unless you know what you're doing. Bad things can happen if you don't.
This snippet will remove .DS_Store files from the selected folder, as well as all of the folders that it contains. All of them. At once.
This command can be used for other types of files, as well. Just replace '.DS_Store' with whatever file name, or type, that you want to delete.
Other uses
You can do this for other file types, as well.
For example, you could use the below to delete all JavaScript files within a containing folder.
find . -name '*.js' -type f -delete
Note that the asterisk is a wildcard, meaning the Terminal is looking for any file with an extension of .js... it can be dangerous to use wildcards...
be careful.
Top comments (7)
There isn't really a need to remove the files, just add the .DS_Store file to .gitignore and you'll never see it in a repository again.
You're right. However, adding .DS_Store to .gitignore after it has been checked in doesn't remove it from the repository. You'll have to use
git rm --cached *.DS_Storeto remove them.Yes! Very true!
In my case, they're not in git, but they can get created in my local copy of the application source and I don't want them copied into in my compiled build. That's a case where I may just want to add this to my build script (I wrote a custom bash script to automate my Bforartists builds).
dot_clean .Thank you!❤️
You're welcome