Disable creation of .AppleDouble files on Mac OS X

Question

Is there a way to disable the creation of .AppleDouble files in Mac OS X (Snow Leopard)?

Answer 1

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1629 tells me that this can be done via

To configure a Mac OS X user account so that .DS_Store files are not created when interacting with a remote file server using the Finder, follow the steps below:

Note: This will affect the user's interactions with SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, and WebDAV servers.

Open Terminal.
Execute this command:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Either restart the computer or log out and back in to the user account.

Answer 2

AppleDouble files (the ones named ._filename) are created when you copy a file containing a resource fork to a non-HFS file system.

Sometimes (but not always) the resource you can manage without the resource fork data - for example copying an mp3 file.

You can suppress the resource fork copying if you use a shell (not finder) by using:

cp -X