A shell script that removes the file Icon? file from Dropbox, created by macOS and corrupted by Dropbox. When used with the LaunchAgent, it runs on login and then every 10 minutes.

When you change a folder's icon, macOS creates a .Icon? file that contains that information. This should be a dot file (hidden), but sometimes Dropbox doesn't handle them properly. The result is an Icon? file (hidden flag enabled, but without the dot).

Rightfully,

The Icon? file does not appear:

• In a normal Finder window

And the Icon? file does appear:

• In the terminal (ls -a output)
• In a Finder window showing hidden files

But, strangely, The Icon? file does appear (wrongfully):

• When viewing the Dropbox folder as a Stack in the Dock

This is what I aimed to fix.

Place com.YOURDOMAIN.rmIcon.plist in /Library/LaunchAgents. Feel free to change "YOURDOMAIN" to whatever you'd like (also change the string within the file).

Place rmIcon.sh in /Library/LaunchAgents.

Run the following commands in Terminal:

cd /Library/LaunchAgents

sudo chown root:wheel rmIcon.sh

sudo chown root:wheel com.YOURDOMAIN.rmIcon.plist

sudo chmod +x rmIcon.sh

launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/com.YOURDOMAIN.rmIcon.plist

The Agent should start automatically, but restart your computer for immediate effect.

The LaunchAgent loads when a user logs in.

launchd runs the shell script immediately when loaded, then once every 10 minutes.

When the shell script starts, it pauses for 20 seconds then removes the unwanted Icon? file.

1. Why touch then rm?

On my machine, I can rm the file manually in the Terminal, but for some reason the script doesn't recognize that the file exists when using rm. Using touch first creates an identical file, then rm can delete both of them. I'm honestly not sure why this happens, I just tinkered until I found something that worked but didn't risk deleting other files.

rmIcon is not affiliated with or otherwise sponsored by Dropbox, Inc.