Update 22 April 2008: As of Leopard 10.5, you can use the dot_clean utility to get rid of these files!

When building Splunk applications, I’m often working on a Mac. There are files that begin with ._ that are resource files, which contain extended attribute information about the files for the OS. This is great and all but I don’t want to include these files when I package up an application and upload it to SplunkBase.

If you don’t have deep OSX knowledge, then keeping these files out of your tarball is harder than it looks. One of our OSX gurus pointed me toward the answer, and I was so excited (yes, I am a geek) that I just had to share.

To build a tarball in Leopard that doesn’t contain the ._ files, use:

COPYFILE_DISABLE=true tar cvzf filename.tar.gz dirtotar

In Tiger, use:

COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE=true tar czvf filename.tar.gz dirtotar

This is definitely going in my .bashrc so I don’t have to fuss with it again:

export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true