That sucks indeed, but there are solutions available to not write these files on external drives.

Same like Thumbs.db etc on Win ;-)

I agree, even linux sucks! Whenever I create an ext3 or reiserfs partition, it creates this journal thing hundreds of megabytes in size. I mean, who told the drive to keep a dairy?

Who does that team of highly educated software engineers think they are, putting random crap on my drives?

it's not a big price for convenience it gives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store

Must be like all that Thumbs.db crap that Windows sticks everywhere?

Hi,

Mac Users are used to many additional features their file manager provides. Features like associate a specific file (not file type) to a specific application. Or put colored labels onto specific files.

To allow these features, the file manager as to store the metadata somewhere. It could use extended attributes, but then, these won't work in FAT file systems.

Even worse: Like NTFS (and maybe ext3 - I'm not sure there), Mac filesystems traditionally provided multiple data streams per file and applications got used to depend on that feature being available and thus stored vital information in these streams.

Thankfully this went more or less away with OS X, but there are still some applications insisting on doing that.

So where to store that information on a file system that doesn't provide the features?

A hidden file would be a workable solution. And .DS_Store is hidden from most GUIs on unix and additionally is marked hidden as good as possible on each file system.

And while the Mac OS filemanager could just not provide the label-feature (though it could be confusing for a user to suddenly lose features when copying a file), storing the rest of the alternate data streams of a file is IMPERATIVE because otherwise, the file may not be readable after copying it to a different file system.

Tell me: How would you solve the problem?

Philip

Same for Linux & Windows. Its just what you have to live with when you are using a current File Manager.

I always wondered where all the .thumb files come from before I used Windows for the first time.

RE: Macs Suck

http://doughboy.wordpress.com/2007/09/14/emacs-sux-too/

BlueHarvest can get rid of that mess if you're using a Mac at some point.

At least, it should be possible to stick all the metadata in one single file in the root folder...