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Garoolgan
Asked: 2017-12-24 10:39:27 +0800 CST

How can I remove duplicate versions of files starting with `._` created when moving files from PC to Mac?

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A very capable young man installed Ubuntu on my Mac, but I don't know how he did it.

When I copy files to my MacBook Pro from another "ordinary" Ubuntu PC I find a lot of duplicate files with the prefix ._ (dot underscore).

On searching the Internet I find that all replies to this question are related to OSX.

Not being very techie, I would appreciate someone sending me a terminal command to wipe all files on my Ubuntu-Mac which have the prefix ._... unless of course this will do something disastrous!

command-line

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can remove files with rm, but as you already guessed that command has its risks. To prevent disasters there's the safe-rm package, so I recommend to install this first with:

    sudo apt install safe-rm

    It will automatically prevent you from removing anything important to the system.

    Now to list every file beginning with ._ in the current directory do:

    ls -1 ._*

    To remove all files beginning with ._ in the current directory asking for every single one do:

    rm -i ._*

    To remove all files beginning with ._ in the current directory without asking – Caution! – do:

    rm ._*

    To do this recursively you can use the extglob functionality which needs to be enabled using shopt -s extglob (once per terminal window where you want to use it). After that you can do

    rm -i **/._*

    and it will remove every ._ file in the current directory as well as its subdirectories (and ask for every single one, you guessed it).

    The asterisk * is a special character to the shell and simply matches any string, so ._* matches any file beginning with ._. The globstar pattern ** followed by a / matches directories and subdirectories and needs the extglob option, which is not enabled by default.

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