I've noticed that when I use the OS X tar command that it adds a bunch of files that start with ._ to the archive. These files store extended file information and are useful on OS X, but on a system that does not understand them, they just add clutter.

Luckily there is a way to stop OS X from adding these files.

This is the kind of thing that I was seeing when testing an archive:


To stop tar from including these hidden files, set the COPYFILE_DISABLE variable to 1 before running tar, like this:


To go a step further, just add an alias to your ~/.profile:




-i