One Minute Mac Tip: Remove .DS_Store files from ZIP Archives
This entry was originally published at my site's personal web log. Additional information or comments may be available on the original posting.
The Mac OS X Finder has some nifty features, one of which is an exceptionally useful contextual menu item to create ZIP archives of folders. Unfortunately, the Finder also has some really, really annoying habits, one of which is to create a file named .DS_Store in each folder a user opens (when not in Column view). What this means is that if you create a ZIP archive on your Mac and then send it to someone who unzips it without the Finder (such as a Windows user using the Windows Explorer), the recipient will see a lot of litter in the form of useless and meaningless .DS_Store files.
If you’re not afraid of the Terminal, this can be avoided. Put the following lines in your ~/.profile (or similar):
alias rmds='find . -name ".DS_Store" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm'
What this does is creates a new command that you can use (rmds) which recursively finds and deletes any regular file named “.DS_Store” starting from the current directory. Thus, running this command in the folder you are about to create an archive out of will clean it first, and will prevent unnecessary confusion on the part of your archive file recipient.
Alternatively, another way to do this is to use the command-line zip program and an (admittedly more complicated) pipeline to remove the .DS_Store files after they have been added to the archive. To do that, use this series of commands:
zip -d ZIPfile.zip `unzip -l ZIPfile.zip | grep .DS_Store | awk '{print $4}'`
where, naturally, ZIPfile.zip is the ZIP archive you want to remove the .DS_Store files from. Creating an alias out of that command (and making it work for paths that contain spaces) is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)
As an aside, the alias, find and xargs commands are incredibly useful in their own right and can be used to do a lot of pretty amazing things. As always, man command will give you the nitty gritty.
Also as an aside, you can stop the Finder from creating .DS_Store files entirely when browsing network volumes (like Windows shares) with another command, documented in Apple’s Knowledge Base.