[OpenAFS] MacOS AppleDouble excretions

Adam Megacz adam@megacz.com
Sun, 10 Oct 2010 19:24:22 +0000


MacOS seems to litter network shares with two kinds of files:

   .DS_Store   (Finder data)
   ._filename  (AppleDouble resource fork)

There's a MacOS setting to disable the first kind of litter.

Unfortunately it seems like there is no way to get MacOS to refrain from
writing the second kind of file, and it seems like Apple deliberately
doesn't want there to be one.

Is there any chance of a setting being included in the MacOS client that
stops this from happening?  The crude way would be to simply refuse to
create files whose name starts with the prefix "._", reporting
permission-denied or something like that.

The more sophisticated approach would probably be to claim to MacOS that
/afs/ supports resource forks, and report permission-denied when an
attempt to write a resource fork is made.  This has the advantage of not
being filename-based and not breaking programs which access the
filesystem through the POSIX APIs.

  - a