Preventing .DS_Store, ._.Trashes, .Spotlight-V100 on USB sticks, ext HD's?

Question

How do I prevent these hidden files from being generated on external hard drives, USB sticks, and network drives? They make a mess on Windows, and I'm a bit tired of using scripts that hunt these down periodically to remove them.
.Spotlight-V100
._.Trashes
.Trashes
.fseventsd
.DS_Store

Answer 1

Blueharvest is the best. you can do it for free yourself but it will require some extra work.
you can run
dot_clean
terminal command on the drive to get rid of the resource forks and you can use "find" to remove .DS_Store files. don't touch .Trashes. It's needed by the system.
i would also leave .Spotlight alone. it will be rebuilt by the OS x next time you plug in the drive and it's also needed by OS X.
the process can be automated. paste the following into Script Editor and save it as an application
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ADD8E6;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
on open some_items
repeat with this_item in some_items
try
set ppath to quoted form of (POSIX path of this_item)
do shell script "find " & ppath & " -name .DS_Store -exec rm '{}' \;"
--do shell script "rm " & ppath & "/.Spotlight-V100"  --uncomment if you want the script to remove the spotlight folder too.
do shell script "dot_clean --keep=dotbar " & ppath
do shell script "diskutil eject " & ppath & ">dev/null&"
end try
end repeat
end open</pre>
put the saved app on the desktop. then when you need to eject a USB stick drop it onto the application. it will clean it up and eject the drive.