Aug 21 2006
scrub-a-dub
Mac OSX drops little fumets all over every drive it touches. These annoying little files are fine in some contexts, but they clutter up the iLiad something fierce.
Scrub-a-dub is a little PLT Scheme application that I built to take care of these .DS_Store, .Trashes, and ._ files. Point scrub-a-dub at a drive, tell it to “Scrub!”, and it will delete all of those irritating files. Of course, it might delete a bunch of other files, too… I’m not making any promises. It should work on Intel Macs under Rosetta; if you try it, and it works, please let me know. If it nukes everything on your machine, please note that I lied about all of my contact information on this site.
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| Who knows what evil scrub-a-dub is capable of… |
Additionally, I don’t know how to auto-detect the media type I’m dealing with—at the moment, I cannot tell the difference between a compact flash card and a hard drive. Therefore, it is conceivably possible to remove these special OSX files from an external hard drive, which might be a Bad Thing. However, like all software, it’s user beware. Who knows… there might be other unimagined evil that scrub-a-dub is capable of, but it works for me.
And it works for Oliver over at iLiadfan, so that makes two people whose computers haven’t been destroyed by scrub-a-dub.
(As a side note: if you want to prevent the creation of these files on networked volumes, check out this hint. It doesn’t help you with USB sticks and compact flash cards, however.)
