DS_Store & Thumbs.db

You might have stumbled across this file when crawling or exploring websites. Apple's operating system creates this file in apparently all directories to store meta information about its contents. In fact, it contains the names of all files and directories within the folder the metafile existed in. The equivalent metafile within a Microsoft Windows machine might be considered the desktop.ini or Thumbs.db.

Due to the fact that .DS_Store is prefixed with a dot, it is hidden from MacOs' Finder, so Mac-developers might not be aware of its existence in the first place. Furthermore, the file format is proprietary and not much documentation about it is available online.

DS_Store Wiki Link

How to parse a .DS_Store file?

By using Python-dsstore

  1. Navigate to the Python-dsstore folder
  2. Download the .DS_Store file (It's hidden due to the file beginnign with a dot. Use ls -la)
wget https://example.com/assets/.DS_Store
  1. Input the .DS_Store file as an input to the main.py script
python3 main.py .DS_Store

Example result

Count:  3
documents
documents
documents

This tells me that the next file or folder is documents. A good thing to do, is to navigate to this endpoint and check for more metadata files!

https://example.com/assets/documents/.DS_Store