Salvation, Thy Name May Be BlueHarvest
I spend a fair bit of my time up to my elbows in the bowels of web apps. (Hmm, perhaps surgery isn’t as aesthetically pleasing a metaphore for coding as, say, painting.) I access my files via a WebDAV share mounted through the Finder. (WebDAV + SVK = me happy.) These apps are written in PHP because that’s what the servers have and I don’t control the servers (which isn’t really pertinent to the current discussion; I’m just trying to avoid the “Why don’t you just use Rails?”-type comments. No offense to the Rails crowd intended. And, after all, PHP isn’t all bad.)
As a side-effect of accessing the files via WebDAV, dot-underscore files are created for every file I edit. WebDAV doesn’t have support for Resource Forks or the good old HFS metadata, so the FInder stashes it all in dot-underscore files according to the AppleDouble Specification.
For some reason, Apache (or PHP, or somebody) sees fit to barf the contents of the dot-underscore files out right before the contents of the actual file. Meaning I get a nice chunk of gibberish at the top of the screen (TEXTR*ch means a lot to me — heck, I’m currently considering putting on a tee shirt — but to 99.999% of the world it’s gibberish). Worse still, the gibberish is followed by a lot of evil-looking PHP error messages because you can’t mess with the HTTP headers after the content has started flowing — the gibberish counts as content. Gibberish! As content!
Until now, I have fixed this with rm `find . -name '._*'`, which cleans them out. But I have to run it manually from the command line. It’s very annoying.
But, today I have learned there is a new warrior on the battlefield. And his — her — its — [I don't know] weapon is mighty and focused. And it’s pointed right at the little dot-underscore files. It’s pre-release software (but hey, does anything actually come out of beta these days?). It looks quite promising and I’m actually going to breach protocol and install it. I’m not sure if that’s because the product’s web site inspires confidence, because I have a burning need for this software, or just because SuperDuper has made me cocky. Oh well, No risk, no reward.
