Lately, I've been doing a lot of development on Mac. With that comes a lot of use of the Finder app.

In order keep your repo clean, you need to remove .DS_Store files from the folders created using the Mac GUI. Doing that by hand is really boring, painful, and repetitive. Enter that awesome thing we call the command line.

Recursively Remove .DS_Store

Open up Terminal

In the command line, type:

cd to/your/directory - then press enter.

Finally, in the command line, type:

find . -name '.DS_Store' -type f -delete - then press enter.

Warning: Never use a wildcard (*) with this command, unless you know what you're doing. Bad things can happen if you don't.

This snippet will remove .DS_Store files from the selected folder, as well as all of the folders that it contains. All of them. At once.

This command can be used for other types of files, as well. Just replace '.DS_Store' with whatever file name, or type, that you want to delete.

Other uses

You can do this for other file types, as well.

For example, you could use the below to delete all JavaScript files within a containing folder.

find . -name '*.js' -type f -delete

Note that the asterisk is a wildcard, meaning the Terminal is looking for any file with an extension of .js... it can be dangerous to use wildcards...

be careful.