THe other day I was surrfing the net and the next thing I know there is a ".DS_Store icon on my desktop. Thinking that I could just drag it to the trash can and it would go away, but the icon comes back as fast as I can delete it!!!! My first concern is did I wind up with a virus or something else???? Everthing seems to work fine however one day I noticed the light was on for the built in camera which freaked me out a bit!! Now wether the problems are associated or not I don't know....... Does anyone know anything about these files??? and what to do... I would sure appreciate some help!!!!

p.s. my computer is a G5mac using mac o sx 10.4.8 versionhttp://www.ehmac.ca/images/smilies/confused.gif

First off, a .DS_Store file is NORMAL. All OS X systems have them, in every folder viewed by the Finder. This is how the Finder keeps tracker of per-folder viewing preferences. Thusly, as soon as it's deleted, a new one will be created. You seem to have enabled the viewing of invisible files (anyting prefixed with a "." is invisible). You may have used an application like TinkerTool, or some such.

There are no viruses for Mac as of yet.

Hope this helps!


Edit: for some more info, you can take a look here:
http://code.jalenack.com/archives/what-is-ds_store/

This may help:

Welcome to Mac-land!

The iSight camera light should only have come on if you were using a program which makes use of it (iChat, BookPedia or Delicious Library, etc.).

I have a utility installed on my MacBook which uses the iSight to take a picture of whoever enters an incorrect login password - so I can see who/if someone is trying to access my machine without permission (which has never happened - however, I have many, many photos of myself looking rather displeased, and more than a few in rather sordid states of undress).

The "Don't Panic" suggestion above is apropos. Apple should give those stickers out to every Windows user who switches

M

I think the big question you should be wondering is how you turned on the display of invisible files? John Clay's suggestion is a good one. If you aren't sure how you did it, just download TinkerTool and disable the viewing of invisible files in Finder.

If you are very sure you didn't enable this yourself, you may want to ask others who use the computer (if you share it with others). Might be a good idea to run Disk Utility and repair the disk permissions.

I have to thank everyone who replyed to my problem!! It was sure nice to find out that the .DS_Store file was normal for mac. I took your advice and loaded tinkertool which took care of the problem right smart like...

Thanks again....

P.S. love this site,very very very helpfull!!!