Reliably create .DS_Store files

Question

Good afternoon,

I was wondering if anyone knew of a failsafe way to prompt the Finder on Mac OSX (10.8, to be precise) to create a .DS_Store file in a directory. I'm aware of what these files are for, and know they are used to save custom view options, but this is pretty vague. Is anyone aware of an action which one can take which will always prompt the Finder to create one of these, as long as it's able to? After a lot of clicking about I can't seem to find a repeatable process for this.

There's a huge amount of help and documentation on how to remove .DS_Store files - indeed, purging them from a Windows fileserver (through editing .plist files) is my eventual goal. However, to test the script I've written to prevent .DS_Store creation, I first need to find a computer which is doing it in the first place.

Answer 1

For anyone stumbling across this - setting the view to 'List mode', opening 'Show view options' and toggling any of the options in 'Show Columns' will always create a .DS_Store file in the folder you are changing.

If you find this is not happening on shares, it's worth opening ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktopservices.plist (Use cmd+shift+G or the terminal to get to your Library, since it was be hidden in the regular Finder) and checking the value of 'DSSontWriteNetworkStores' it should be 'False' if you'd like .DS_Stores to be created.