So via what I suspect is a cron'd rsync gone awry, I noticed that I have ~25000 variants of .DS_Store in a directory that's on an external disk, they're named "..DS_Store.FOO" where FOO varies. The problem is that I can seem to delete them, even using the various tricks I've seen over the years for removing files with oddball names. No problem, I said - I moved all of the real files into another directory and then just tried to do an 'rm -r' on the original directory ... no luck, it fails to delete those files and says directory not empty. Tried it again with 'rm -rf' and still no luck.

I have no idea how to get rid of this thing, does anyone have any idea?