Removing .DS_Store files from archives

#19, it has nothing to do with rm limit. It is the shell character limit that causes the problem. when you do a glob (*) and your directory has a lot of files you overrun the shell limit. By the way if this is only required when you want to archive something why not do
gtar --execlude ".DS_Store" zcvf filename.tar.gz dir

Yeah, CleanArchiver rulez!

- find has a '-delete' action which is the right thing to do

- piping to xargs works even for files with spaces in names if you use 'find -print0' and 'xargs -0', that's what these options are for.

Or, if you're using the fantastic Z-Shell:

rm **/.DS_Store

Just do:
sudo rm -rf *

That should take care of everything :)

NOTE: DO NOT ACTUALLY DO THIS

Don't know whether this is the case on the UNIX on which Mac OS is based, but some older UNIXes have versions of rm which has a limited number of arguments. It's a high limit, but I've bumped up against it a number of times when doing a 'rm *' in directories with huge number of files. Returns 'too many args' and would probably do so with a huge xargs.

Hence we had to do the find . -name * -exec rm -f {} ; quite a lot to get around that. I could see .DS_Store's getting numerous and hitting that limit, if there is with Darwin.

@Christopher Finke:

That will fail when your subdirectories have spaces in their names, which is why you should use -exec.

#14. No thanks. I rather not look at your spammy "excelent" (sic) website filled with spelling, factual, and grammar errors.

If it is just a single folder, I find simply opening the folder, selecting all the files (which wont select the .ds since it is hidden) and selecting "create archive from xx items" is alot quicker.

Why do I care about these files?