When I work locally on projects I like to use symlinks for all of my shared libraries. It makes it way easier than having to manage a million different versions of the same files.

Recently I was creating a tarball (.tar) archive to deploy somewhere using the -h option to follow symlinks like so:

I noticed that many of the symlinked files that were copied into the archive ended up being transformed into apple double files. Of course, this is quite annoying, and I wanted to get rid of them. I did some googling and found the answer buried somewhere on the internets so I thought I'd make it easier to find.

All you have to do is add the following to your ~/.bash_profile:

That's all.