Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

General Discussion

Greg Starkins
PLUS
Greg Starkins
Courses Plus Student 4,905 Points
Posted by Greg Starkins
Greg Starkins
Courses Plus Student 4,905 Points

Different files for Mac

This may be stupid question, but only ever having used Mac a handful of times, I'm clueless.

When I download project files from Treehouse, some have a folder saying _MACOSX. Obviously I looked in it and the only difference I could see was that there were no html files and the other files had ._ written just before the filename.

My question is; Why is this?

Many thanks, Greg.

1 Answer

Dino Paškvan
PLUS
Dino Paškvan
Courses Plus Student 44,108 Points
Dino Paškvan
Dino Paškvan
Courses Plus Student 44,108 Points

The __MACOSX folder contains metadata and indexing data which is created by OS X automatically. In OS X, they're hidden, unfortunately, on other operating systems, they show up and often confuse users. Sometimes they slip through when you create zip archives.

You can delete that folder — the only thing you can divine from it is that the original archive was created on a Mac. :)

Greg Starkins
Greg Starkins
Courses Plus Student 4,905 Points
Greg Starkins
Greg Starkins
Courses Plus Student 4,905 Points

So if I was to get a Mac one day I could still view my old project files I downloaded on PC on my new Mac?

Dino Paškvan
Dino Paškvan
Courses Plus Student 44,108 Points

Yes. Even if you remove them and then copy the folder to a Mac, the OS would just re-generate them.

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

> Even if you remove them and then copy the folder to a Mac, the OS would just re-generate them.

I believe this is incorrect. Some extended attributes will be re-created like finder info. However in the case of applications, critical information is stored in the extended attributes. The only way to know for sure is to check if a file still works on a Mac after you delete the info.

A cleaner solution is to mark the __MACOSX directory as hidden on Windows

That being said, it's unlikely that any of code or image files downloaded from Treehouse actually have extended attributes that are necessary.