If you aren’t lucky enough to have corporate servers that run AFP, you’ve probably had just about enough of the .DS_Store files that Mac OS X leaves lying around your Windows SMB and Linux NFS shares. While the files are turned off by default in Leopard, there are enough Tiger and Panther servers around to drive underfunded IT departments mad.

Keep in mind that those files hold comments and folder views for the Finder, so you’ll be annoying your Mac users by disabling them. But if your own obsessive-compulsive tendencies outweigh other people’s convenience (and whose don’t?), it’s as simple as running the following command on each client machine:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktopservices \
DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

If you push this out with ARD, Casper Suite, or LANrev, you can leave off “sudo” as you’ll be running the command as root. Once the prefernces have changed, just reboot your machines for it to take effect. Just like magic, no more .DS_Store!

Special Thanks: It’s a beautiful lazy holiday weekend in Seattle as I write this, and there’s nothing lazier than stealing an old trick from the Creativetechs Tips blog.