Is it possible to remove or delete the "Music" folder?

Question

Is there anyway to get Music out of my way in my home directory? Either deleting it, or moving it to someplace else.

Now, I know that this question has been asked before (I've read this one and this one too), so I know that some more details are needed or I'll get back bogus answers... So: what I want is to rename or remove the actual folder, hopefully with any magical stuff that the OS is doing with it (like scanning it for changes, or worse: add meta-data files).

Symbolic links are unrelated here, since I want to move the actual directory to a place I don't really care about, I don't want to create some other name for it. I also don't care what's visible in the Finder -- so flipping some hidden bit that makes it not show up there won't do me any good. This is making it a very different issue from the ones in those other questions.

(The complete story is that I have recently started using a Mac, and I need to wire it into the network of file syncing that I do across many machines (using unison). Naturally, I have music in a music directory, which collides with OSX's Music thing, so I need to get it out of my way. That's why I don't care how it's shown in the Finder or if I'm losing some marvelous iTunes features. (I will most likely not even notice it if both Finder and iTunes disappear from this machine.))

Answer 1

Do you have any indication that the OS will mind if you just rm -rf Music?

As far as I know, iTunes is the only app that uses that directory (at least on my machine, there seems to be nothing else in it).

So if you don't ever launch iTunes again, that directory should never reappear. If you want to guard against accidentally opening iTunes, you can move its library to a different location before removing the directory.

Answer 2

It won't work. The system keeps re-creating a Music folder in the Home directory.

1. If you run them, then yes, iTunes and many other applications use the ~/Music directory.

2. Moving the iTunes Media folder won't get you out from under that. iTunes creates many other items in the ~/Music directory in addition to the Media folder, and those other items will not get moved from ~/Music when the Media folder does. And given the chance, (i.e., running it), iTunes will create those items, re-create them after you remove them, and re-create them again and again.

3. As far as I can tell, and I've worked pretty hard on it, you're stuck with something called "Music" or "music" going to be in your Home directory. I say "something", because it can also be a file. It doesn't sound like this approach is a viable solution for you, but it may be for others with almost exactly the same requirements (but not exactly the same). It worked for me. Though not a solution, hopefully the preceding information is informative. I believe it to be incontrovertible.

4. After deleting the offending folder, I created two empty, zero byte files and saved them in the Home directory. I named one "music" and the other ".music" with no file extension in either case. Their presence blocks the system from creating a folder in that location with the name "Music". I set the immutable flag (chflags uchg ~/music) on both, I manually hid the visible one, and I roundly revoked the "write" permission from each. One would think that would do the trick, but when the system cannot save its folder there because it cannot over-write the files, it tries to change the permissions back and restore its power to write. To overcome this I made root the owner of the two files. That about did it. No more Music folder.

Note to Editor: Please do not alter the syntax of "something called 'Music' or 'music' going to be in your Home directory" above. It may sound awkward, but it is extremely precisely worded. I'd rather not post at all if the phrase is not allowed to stand ver batim. Thanks.

Answer 3

I do not know about the other answers, but checking the ACL (ls -le) gave me this:

0: group:everyone deny delete

so I chmod -N'd (or chmod -a# 0) the folders to remove the ACL and I successfully deleted Music like a piece of cake.

I have deleted Downloads, Music, Movies, Desktop (maybe also Documents), Public using this method, but I have not been able to delete Pictures for some reason.

Also, if you would like to also make your files "undeletable", just add the ACL:

chmod +a 'group:everyone deny delete'

Answer 4

From: Remove Movies Home folder at Official Apple Support Communities

It is set to not delete because it may be expected by some programs. If you really think it is necessary to delete the folder, you could remove it in the Terminal with

sudo rm -r ~/Movies

Be careful and good luck. If you mess up typing the command you could delete something you didn't want to. sudo will ask for your password, but won't actually show anything on screen when you type it. rm is remove and -r tells it to work through any subfolders. ~/ is your home directory.

Answer 5

If you just want to hide it from Finder, open your Console and execute the following command line in your Home directory:

chflags hidden ./Music

The directory is still there, however, Finder will not display it as it is marked hidden.

If you change your mind, then:

chflags nohidden ./Music

For complete chflags documentation, type:

man chflags.