remove .._. files

[MrFusion]

How can I forcibly remove .._. files from my time capsule?
These appeared after a temporary backup of a windows usb drive. Now I want to get rid of them. It is not tidy and driving me nuts. They are over 23000 of them.

sudo rm -rf .._.* is not working.

 

[r0k]

How can I forcibly remove .._. files from my time capsule?
These appeared after a temporary backup of a windows usb drive. Now I want to get rid of them. It is not tidy and driving me nuts. They are over 23000 of them.

sudo rm -rf .._.* is not working.

Dot underscore files are a curse. OS X creates them all over the place to contain "meta data" and they are most commonly created on Windows volumes which OS X information is copied to. If they are sitting on your time capsule, chances are they were copied there and really originated on whatever information was being copied to your time capsule. Check there first. In finder, make sure show hidden files is enabled.

As for deleting them, it sounds like you are on the right track with the sudo rm but anything starting with .. is usually the parent directory. Are you sure that's the file name and it's not simply ._something.something? In that case sudo \rm -rf ._* should work. But rm -rf .._.* might not find anything.

 

[MrFusion]

Dot underscore files are a curse. OS X creates them all over the place to contain "meta data" and they are most commonly created on Windows volumes which OS X information is copied to. If they are sitting on your time capsule, chances are they were copied there and really originated on whatever information was being copied to your time capsule. Check there first. In finder, make sure show hidden files is enabled.

No other files were found.

As for deleting them, it sounds like you are on the right track with the sudo rm but anything starting with .. is usually the parent directory. Are you sure that's the file name and it's not simply ._something.something? In that case sudo \rm -rf ._* should work. But rm -rf .._.* might not find anything.

Unfortunately, this is not working. Also, these files are zero kb.

sudo rm -rf .._.Trashes.*
-bash: /usr/bin/sudo: Argument list too long

The use of wildcards ?* has no effect either.

 

[bigwig]

Test Wildcard:
find . -name '..*_*' -print0 | xargs -0 echo

Run Delete:
find . -name '..*_*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rvf

 

[MrFusion]

Test Wildcard:
find . -name '..*_*' -print0 | xargs -0 echo

Finds the files.

Run Delete:
find . -name '..*_*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rvf

Does not remove them.

 

[bigwig]

Does not remove them.

What's the error message from rm?

 

[MrFusion]

What's the error message from rm?

Nothing. No messages at all.