If you have ever used a Mac to connect to a Windows server at work, you have seen them. They are sometimes hard to find, but if you turn on your “View Hidden Files” option, there they are.

Lots of files that start with “._” litter the file system of your windows machine. What are they? They are resource forks. What is a resource fork?

The resource fork is a construct of the Macintosh operating system (and implemented in all of the filesystems used on the Macintosh, MFS, HFS and HFS Plus), used to store structured data in a file, alongside and tightly bound to unstructured data within the data fork. [via Answers.com]

If you work in an environment where everyone likes to see hidden files, they are quite the pesky little bugger. One way to clean them up is just to select and delete them from a Windows computer.

Here is an Applescript that claims to go through and automatically delete them. Originally written to clean the files off an iPod, there shouldn’t be any reason this wouldn’t work on normal files.

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