When are Finder hidden files created ?

Had a scary episode which rendered my GPS inoperative.


Plugged the GPS into my Mac, set it to USB-disk mode, resulting in tge
Mac mouting the FAT disk in the GPS' micro SD card. Got to see the
various .GPX files as well as the map database file.

However, the GPS would no longer reboot after that. Had to remove the
card for it to reboot properly.

Turns out it doesn't like some of the files/directories that get created
by the Mac (.Trashes ._Trashes, .Spotlight and others).

I was able to insert the SD card into the GPS and remount it, and use
command line to remove all those hidden files, and then used the finder
to dismount the disk (just trag it to the trash) and then the GPS
rebooted fine.


At what point does the Mac created all those hidden files/Directories ?
First time the FINDER opens the disk ? As the disk is mounted ? or when
the disk is first modified ?

Is there a way to tell the Mac to never create those files for FAT disks?

In article <4be75d98$0$1507$>, JF Mezei
<> wrote:

> Had a scary episode which rendered my GPS inoperative.
>
> Plugged the GPS into my Mac, set it to USB-disk mode, resulting in tge
> Mac mouting the FAT disk in the GPS' micro SD card. Got to see the
> various .GPX files as well as the map database file.
>
> However, the GPS would no longer reboot after that. Had to remove the
> card for it to reboot properly.
>
> Turns out it doesn't like some of the files/directories that get created
> by the Mac (.Trashes ._Trashes, .Spotlight and others).

figures. report a bug that finder rendered your gps inoperative.

polluting non-mac file systems with dot files is incredibly stupid and
should not be done. i've heard of it rendering cameras inoperative and
now gps devices. seriously, report it as a bug to apple. maybe one more
report will be enough to get them to fix it, but i doubt it.

> I was able to insert the SD card into the GPS and remount it, and use
> command line to remove all those hidden files, and then used the finder
> to dismount the disk (just trag it to the trash) and then the GPS
> rebooted fine.

good.

> At what point does the Mac created all those hidden files/Directories ?
> First time the FINDER opens the disk ? As the disk is mounted ? or when
> the disk is first modified ?

i think it's when finder sees a new volume.

> Is there a way to tell the Mac to never create those files for FAT disks?

not that i'm aware. there's an option to not do it on network volumes
though.

it's obnoxious and as you've found out, potentially dangerous. at least
you knew how to fix it. a typical user would not.

On 2010-05-10 11:12:55 +1000, JF Mezei <> said:

> Had a scary episode which rendered my GPS inoperative.
>
>
> Plugged the GPS into my Mac, set it to USB-disk mode, resulting in tge
> Mac mouting the FAT disk in the GPS' micro SD card. Got to see the
> various .GPX files as well as the map database file.
>
> However, the GPS would no longer reboot after that. Had to remove the
> card for it to reboot properly.
>
> Turns out it doesn't like some of the files/directories that get created
> by the Mac (.Trashes ._Trashes, .Spotlight and others).
>
> I was able to insert the SD card into the GPS and remount it, and use
> command line to remove all those hidden files, and then used the finder
> to dismount the disk (just trag it to the trash) and then the GPS
> rebooted fine.
>
>
> At what point does the Mac created all those hidden files/Directories ?
> First time the FINDER opens the disk ? As the disk is mounted ? or when
> the disk is first modified ?
>
> Is there a way to tell the Mac to never create those files for FAT disks?

Those files perpetually gave me the shits too. I was getting
".DS_Store" files magically appearing in my Eclipse projects and some
inevitably found their way into deployment packages to cause various
kinds of strange errors at deployment time.

The problem was fixed in my case by switching to the Windows Eclipse
platform for Java software development.

JF Mezei wrote on May 10, 2010:

> Had a scary episode which rendered my GPS inoperative.
>
>
> Plugged the GPS into my Mac, set it to USB-disk mode, resulting in tge
> Mac mouting the FAT disk in the GPS' micro SD card. Got to see the
> various .GPX files as well as the map database file.
>
> However, the GPS would no longer reboot after that. Had to remove the
> card for it to reboot properly.
>
> Turns out it doesn't like some of the files/directories that get created
> by the Mac (.Trashes ._Trashes, .Spotlight and others).
>
> I was able to insert the SD card into the GPS and remount it, and use
> command line to remove all those hidden files, and then used the finder
> to dismount the disk (just trag it to the trash) and then the GPS
> rebooted fine.
>
>
> At what point does the Mac created all those hidden files/Directories ?
> First time the FINDER opens the disk ? As the disk is mounted ? or when
> the disk is first modified ?
>
> Is there a way to tell the Mac to never create those files for FAT disks?

I had the same problem with my Garmin GPSmap76. Any attempt at reading files
on the internal memory or the flash card crashed the gps unit (due to the
hidden Mac files according to Garmin support).

I've solved the problem with BlueHarvest
http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest/

This very nice little app. will transparently delete all offending files from
any non-Mac disks mounted. You can set it either to do this automatically (as
I do) or manually if you wish. Problem solved! It's worth every penny or cent
of the $16.95 license.

--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
email: mike_lane at mac dot com

Jolly Roger wrote on May 10, 2010:

> In article <. com>,
> Mike Lane <> wrote:
>
>> I had the same problem with my Garmin GPSmap76. Any attempt at reading
>> files
>> on the internal memory or the flash card crashed the gps unit (due to the
>> hidden Mac files according to Garmin support).
>
> It seems ludicrous to me that it should be acceptable behavior for a
> device to crash or malfunction simply because files it will never use
> and shouldn't care about exist on the storage medium it uses!
>
>

I agree, it's a bug in the Garmin unit. But since it exists one either has to
discard the gps unit, or work around it.

--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
email: mike_lane at mac dot com

On 05-10-2010 10:22, Jolly Roger wrote:
> doublePlusPaleo<> wrote:
>> The problem was fixed in my case by switching to the Windows Eclipse
>> platform for Java software development.
>
> Talk about overkill. : ) All you needed to do was remove those files
> from packages before deploying them.

Or fix the design bug that causes your code to not ignore them.

--
Wes Groleau

Gaffes Can Be Deceiving
http://Ideas.Lang-Learn.us/WWW?itemid=610

Mike Lane wrote:

> I agree, it's a bug in the Garmin unit. But since it exists one either has to
> discard the gps unit, or work around it.

Does FAT 16 allow directories/files with weird names ?

Those devices don't have a fancy file system and fancy software for
filenames. So it is within the real of acceptable that they would choke
when they are presented with filenames that they don't expect.

The fact is that one should be able to mount a foreign file system
without having the Finder put its junk all over it.

On 2010-05-11 00:22:22 +1000, Jolly Roger <> said:
>>
>> Those files perpetually gave me the shits too. I was getting
>> ".DS_Store" files magically appearing in my Eclipse projects and some
>> inevitably found their way into deployment packages to cause various
>> kinds of strange errors at deployment time.
>>
>> The problem was fixed in my case by switching to the Windows Eclipse
>> platform for Java software development.
>
> Talk about overkill. : ) All you needed to do was remove those files
> from packages before deploying them.

More anger than straight out overkill. It was just a matter of
powering up my Windows development system and a minute or so to rsynch
the projects over.

I realized soon enough what the problem was, but not before I had cost
actual money to have someone visit the test site.

I was going to switch the development over to Windows anyway, because
the next phase involved porting an object model to .NET.

On 2010-05-11 07:53:06 +1000, Wes Groleau <Groleau+> said:

> On 05-10-2010 10:22, Jolly Roger wrote:
>> doublePlusPaleo<> wrote:
>>> The problem was fixed in my case by switching to the Windows Eclipse
>>> platform for Java software development.
>>
>> Talk about overkill. : ) All you needed to do was remove those files
>> from packages before deploying them.
>
> Or fix the design bug that causes your code to not ignore them.

Nothing to do with code design at all. Deployment tools are a different animal.

JF Mezei wrote on May 11, 2010:

> Mike Lane wrote:
>
>> I agree, it's a bug in the Garmin unit. But since it exists one either
>> has to discard the gps unit, or work around it.
>
> Does FAT 16 allow directories/files with weird names ?
>
> Those devices don't have a fancy file system and fancy software for
> filenames. So it is within the real of acceptable that they would choke
> when they are presented with filenames that they don't expect.
>
> The fact is that one should be able to mount a foreign file system
> without having the Finder put its junk all over it.

Also in defence of Garmin I should say the unit in question is a fairly old
design which first came out well before they claimed any compatibility with
Mac systems

--
Mike Lane
UK North Yorkshire
email: mike_lane at mac dot com