Getting rid of those annoying ._ files

It all started so innocuously. All I was asked to do was put some photos onto a USB stick that could be played on a TV in my local pub. Easy. JPEGs duly loaded onto the drive, plugged in...and found to be incompatible. Weird.

So I checked the JPEG file format against the specification. I changed sizes, I changed encoding type.  Still not playing. Really annoying, and not a little embarrassing!

Then I noticed - the TV was trying to display files with names starting with '._'. Where the hell did they come from? And the penny dropped. OSX creates all kinds of special files to work with non-HFS file systems - like the USB drive's FAT32 format.

These files are part of the AppleDouble format, and don't show up if you reveal hidden files in OSX (see this excellent article on how to show/hide the hidden files). So to get rid of them, you can either use a Windows or linux machine, or use the dot_clean command in OSX.

Hopefully this will save someone some time tracking down this problem.