Eclipse Projects + OSX - some Tips

More and more developers are using eclipse under OSX. Here are two tips from my current experiences:

1. Never name an Eclipse Project *.service

A project name like my.namespace.something.service causes OSX to think its an OSX service and the Finder will show it as an OSX Service and not as folder:

Using right-mouse-click you can look into the "package":

Last months it happens sometimes, that my *.service projects suddenly contain only 0 Bytes and the projects were empty. So I renamed all those projects.

2..DS_Store can confuse P2

Using the Finder of OSX to view folders and files from Eclipse installations causes the Finder to create .DS_Store files.

Suddenly I got on error while starting Eclipse (Bugzilla 247177). Reason was an unexpected .DS_Store file.

Using this command you can remove all .DS_Store files from a whole folder hierarchy:

    find . -name *.DS_Store -type f -exec rm {} \;

(Its always a good idea on OSX to make „.“ - Systemfiles visible, because many important Eclipse files start with „.“: .project, .classpath, ...)

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