How to Delete and Ignore All .DS_Store Files in GitHub Repositories

If you are using a Mac, chances are that you have a lot of .DS_Store files in all kinds of folders. While they don’t cause any problems, it might be ugly if these files appear in your GitHub repositories. How to delete and ignore all of them? This thread on Stack Overflow helped me quite a bit.

First, delete all .DS_Store files #

The following solution came from here .

At the root of your local repository¹, run:

find . -name .DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 git rm -f --ignore-unmatch
git add .
git commit -m "Remove .DS_Store from everywhere"
git push origin master

Second, create a .gitignore file and ignore .DS_Store #

The following solution came from here and here .

If you don’t have it in your repository yet, create one:

touch .gitignore
echo \.DS_Store >> .gitignore
git add .
git commit -m "Creating .gitignore and ignore .DS_Store"
git push origin master

Third, exclude all .DS_Store files in all repositories in the future #

The following answer came from here

If you want to exlude all .DS_Store files from your future repositories:

echo .DS_Store >> ~/.gitignore_global
git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

Last modified on 2021-10-05