Will setting a cron job to delete ._ shadow files on a linux share work?
Before Mac OS X, the Mac OS used ‘forked’ files, which have two components: a data fork and a resource fork. The Mac OS Standard (HFS) and Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) disk formats support forked files. When you move these types of files to other disk formats, the resource fork can be lost.

With Mac OS X, there is a mechanism called “AppleDouble” that allows the system to work with file systems that do not have a forked file feature, such as remote NFS, SMB, WebDAV directories, or local UFS volumes. AppleDouble does this by converting the file into two separate files. The first new file keeps the original name and contains the data fork of the original file. The second new file has the name of the original file prefixed by a “._ ” and contains the resource fork of the original file. If you see both files, the ._ file can be safely ignored. Sometimes when deleting a file, the ._ component will not be deleted. If this occurs you can safely delete the ._ file.

Essentially, when you’re working on files located on a network share you end up with duplicates of the file with a “._” prefix.

You can run the following command to clean the files up.

find . -name '._*' -exec rm '{}' ';'


You could also make this into a launchctl or cron task.