Support for ._* files

[kaatt]

I've got two partitions in my internal drive: a HFS+ where OS X is installed and an exFAT (for easy file sharing between Windows and OS X) where I keep my files. After moving my files to the exFAT partition, I learned that it doesn't have any support for file permissions, everything is 0777 😱 which causes

insanity in every app excluding Finder. Dropbox syncs all ._ files to every device I have. File sharing between Windows and OS X became messier than ever. Every file has a dot underscore duplicate (._), you can't find the file you're looking for in Windows Explorer because you've to ignore all those pesky dot underscores.

I installed Asepsis overjoyed, assuming it would fix this problem but 🙅

Can you please please add support for partitions and redirecting ._ files?

[darwin]

I'm sorry I'm not going to do that. I don't have personal need for this and asepsis is a dead project with El Capitan release.

[kaatt]

But a good lot of users will disable SIP. I'm going to disable SIP. I'm confident asepsis will still be used on El Capitan by a lot of people.

Can you estimate how long it will take to implement this? (I mean if it is simple then I may be able to make a PR)

[darwin]

I can't tell you how difficult it would be. You have to first find out what processes are responsible for those ._ files. If it is exFAT filesystem driver somewhere in kernel, you are out of luck.

Asepsis works by injecting some code into processes responsible for .DS_Store file manipulations and redirecting their functionality. It is not a general mechanism for filtering/redirecting filesystem operations.

[kaatt]

I thought those files were present in HFS+ too but a quick google search led me to this:

They're created to store file information that would otherwise go into an extended attribute on HFS+ (Apple native) or Unix/UFS volumes; in earlier Mac OS this would be the resource fork. Finder file operations will create them automatically to store the icon information, plus Time Machine stores some information in them so if you copy a file backed up via TM it will have that information copied as well.

Doesn't look like my job yet.

[kaatt]

This was a dumb decision by whoever thought it'd no problem if you cluttered non-HFS directories with ._files

The redirecting behaviour should've been the default behaviour 😞

Got an app called BlueHarvest. It seems to prevent their creation but I want redirection and it's not free.

[darwin]

From the SO link it looks like this is not a kernel-level feature, but it is implemented in some user-land framework. Finder and TM uses it (probably transparently) when manipulating files. If that is the case it should be possible to use Asepsis's approach. The second question is if that framework uses standard libc functionality (fopen and friends) or uses some other calls to manipulate them. Asepsis is able to redirect fopen and similar libc calls.

[darwin]

I think you should reconsider using exFAT from OS X directly. Maybe mount it as a network volume instead? For example I'm using an AirPort Extreme as my home wifi access point and have large USB3 disk attached to it. This way I can mount it as a data volume to all Mac and Windows machines at home. Under mac, it is mounted as afpfs. I've never had the problem with Finder creating ._ files there.

[kaatt]

Thanks for the suggestions. Can't use network volumes for several reasons, main is I need that PCIe storage speed. Moving to an external USB 3 disk won't prevent ._ files either.

I guess the best way will be to reformat as HFS+ and install a HFS+ driver in Windows. That'll fix the permissions issues too.

I can't understand why they don't share the HFS+ and NTFS implementation with each other or why exFAT was released with these big limitations when it was made for better compatibility across OSes.

[darwin]

Good luck with that. Last time I tried to use HFS+ from Windows I ended giving up.

[kaatt]

I downloaded a free one from Paragon with R/W support long time ago. Didn't try it because I didn't use OS X at that time. Now it should come in good use I think.

[kaatt]

Here it is : https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows-free/