Keeping .DS_Store files at bay
.DS_Store files are to Mac what Thumbs.db are to Windows: annoying, meaningless and worst of all, ubiquitous. Whenever you browse to a folder which contains certain magic files or you do something like moving an icon to a certain position, they system will create those files in the folder. Then you happily type in git status, or svn status, when lo and behold! those defiant .DS_Store files are there, waiting to be added to your repository.
So you type this in, frantically:
find . -name ".DS_Store" -delete
and then before it happens again, you edit your .gitignore file (which as the user's manual helpfully points out, should be in the top level of your working directory
) and make sure it contains the following lines:
# Ignore useless stuff
.DS_Store
Or if you're using subversion, you can set the svn:ignore property:
svn propset svn:ignore .DS_Store .
You may want to make sure there isn't a previous value for svn:ignore with svn propget svn:ignore .
and if that's the case, probably "merge" them so that you don't lose those values.
While we are on it we could also add Thumbs.db to the list, but since I haven't used a Windows system for developing in a long time, I don't need to do that (lucky me!)