Hey all, I recently switched from Windows to macOS and really enjoy patching there a lot. There's one thing that's quite annoying though and after lots of useless googling and support chats, I felt like people here might have answers:

I built quite a few abstractions for my own use and some of them follow names like perlin.3d~. To keep files and folders a little organized, I place abstractions in folders with the same name. So in this case, the actual abstraction is placed in path_to_externals/perlin.3d~/perlin.3d~.pd.

This worked pretty well for my Windows setup. And it also basically works on macOS. But I'm using Dropbox to sync my Pd stuff and in this case, syncing doesn't work - the folder doesn't sync back to Dropbox and Finder alerts inside the folder that Dropbox encountered an unexpected error. items may be out of date. Dropbox support says it's an Apple problem and Apple until now says this is "somehow" connected to temporary file conventions and they can't do anything about it.

So here are my questions:

• Are these names bad practice for Pd abstractions?
• Is there a better way to organize them other than through folders like this?
• Am I the only one experiencing this? (Please no!)

@ben.wes Periods "." have specific meanings in the file system, depending on where they are in the filename. In Pd we generally use an underline or a hyphen when trying to avoid spaces.
You might be able to do a search and replace...... but maybe not because periods can cause problems with that in Unix........ https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/274024/are-periods-valid-characters-in-file-or-folder-names
David,

@whale-av thanks a lot for the quick response! I guess I'll give up on these names then (although aesthetically I prefer the separating periods to underscores or hyphens - but that's obviously not an argument anymore). so it's going to be "perlin_3d~" etc. in the future... acceptable enough.