I have an external USB drive that is formatted with ExFAT. I'm on MacOS Ventura. I noticed that some of my files on that drive have attributes that I deleted with xattr -cr. The attributes vanished but now I have thousands of dot underscore files (._) on my drive, sometimes tens of ._ before the file name, e.g. ._._._._._._._._myfile.txt. I tried to delete them with dot_clean but they reappear seconds later. How do I prevent the generation of ._files?
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._file's job. You cannot prevent their creation. I'm really not sure what trying to remove xattrs from a file that can't contain them would do… but probably not what you want. Unless you really need this for cross-platform use, avoid ExFAT on Mac. For cross-platform you're better off in the long term using HFS+ & 3rd party software on other platforms that can read HFS