honestly - while a Mac is certainly less painful to use than winshit, putting rubbish files recursively into each(!!) accessed folder, on all thumbdrives ever inserted, that’s something Jobs deserves to burn in hell for.
I am not familiar with MacOS, but that seems like a nightmare. What is the purpose of these files?
the macos file browser, Finder, lets you set a background for a folder, move file icons around to arbitrary positions, other shenanigans. in order for this to work across systems on removable storage media and network mounts, they have this.
Iirc they’re indexes for the system wide search feature, Spotlight
Is there a valid reason not to store that [[anywhere else]], ideally in Spotlight’s data?
Maybe. There are many ways to move files and directories around without using Finder, at which point all indexed data about those files and directories will be stale. Forcing something as core as
mvto update Spotlight would be significantly worse, I think. By keeping the.DS_Storefiles co-located with the directory they index, moving a directory does not invalidate the index data (though moving a file without using Finder still does). Whether retaining indexing on directory moves is a compelling enough reason to force the files everywhere is probably dependent on whether that’s a common enough pattern among workflows of users, and whether spotlight performance would suffer drastically if it were reliant on a central store not resilient against such moves.So, it’s probably a shaky reason at best.
Nope, that’s the .Spotlight-{INDEX} folder which is also often created 😁
You’d want that, but a lot of programs do that, both in Windows and Linux.
e.g. The
.directoryfiles with the[Desktop Entry]spec by freedesktop.org
Dolphin has the option to enable/disable the featuretoday I learned - using Linux at home since 2005ish and I have never had an auto-file generated on any USB attached drives of mine…
I have manually made
.directoryfiles (using a bash script) to set icons on folders.It feels good when programs let you know what they intend on doing.
FWIW Dolphin only does it if the filesystem doesn’t provide a way to add that metadata directly to the directory and you change the view configuration for that directory away from your standard configuration. Which is how the standard describes to do it. (Some file managers incorrectly add those .directory files to every directory you visit.)
A mac will add a .DS_Store file to any directory just by breathing on it.
Well, those are different specifications. Apple(who wants everything for themselves) vs FDO(whose main goal seems to be interoperability)
