On Mac you can use Terminal to easily remove all of the hidden files/folders from existing zip files. Use an app like YemuZip or free alternative to compress/zip without any hidden files Use command line to exclude hidden files from NEW zip archives May not be a huge deal for smaller zip files, but we’re talking about potentially millions or billions of zip files downloaded every day, needlessly bloated with useless data. Which are utterly useless to non-Mac devices and users.įurther, by adding a duplicate set of hidden files to the zip archive, Mac essentially is doubling the size of the download zip file, which of course wastes bandwidth, disk space, and everything else.

So anyone downloading your zip files on their Windows, Linux, or other non-Mac is going to see all those hidden files and folders. This is a real problem because many people use Mac to zip files to share on the Web. Why does macOS include hidden files in zip archives? It makes absolutely zero sense. In fact quite the opposite: the hidden files serve NO purpose other than to waste bandwidth, time, energy, resources, etc. Thus the confusion: Why on earth are the hidden files added in the first place? They are completely excluded when unzipping on Mac, and never needed for any reason on any other machine. So again, all the hidden files/folders added by Mac are included in the unzipped files ONLY when the files are unzipped on non-Mac machines. Mac excludes all hidden macOS files when opening zip archives ( view hidden files enabled)

How to zip files on mac