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How to disable the creation of .DS_Store files on network shares

pest_control Sympthoms
  • While navigating in a network share previously accessed by an OSX user, you might notice that inside every folder they opened there is a .DS_Store file.

search Causes
  • By default, OSX creates a .DS_Store file inside every folder accessed by the user, on both local and remote paths. Those files contains metadata used by Finder to keep information about files names, size, position, etc...

construction Fix/Workaround/Solution
Follow those steps to disable the creation of .DS_Store files on network shares:
  1. On MacOS, open the Terminal app
  2. Paste the following command:
    3. defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
    Note that the shell doesn't output any confirmation of the successful execution of the command.
  3. If for any reason you need to revert back to the default situation, simply exeute the command again changing true with false>:
    4. defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores false

school Further considerations
  • Note that this setting applies to the user and not the whole machine, so if you have other accounts you will need to run the command for them too.




Article ID: SYS-OSX-0001