[Bug] VC Packager detects MacOS metadata files as actual files

[TheCleric]

What happened?

When running vc-packager my very first time as instructed in the segmentation tutorial against the campfire zip file, I could not get it to work. I would consistently get an error stating that:

Found 477 files which did not match the initial slice:3s<00m:00s] 954/954                                                                                                                                            
<LONG LIST OF FILES HERE>
ERROR: Slices in slice directory do not have matching properties (width/height/depth)

After a lot of banging my head against the wall I realized it was because MacOS on a non-HFS formatted drive (such as the ExFAT external disk I was using or a samba share) writes a metadata file for each actual file it performs IO on. For example for the file /campfire/rec/0168.tif that was extracted from the zip file, there was a corresponding metadata file of /campfire/rec/._0168.tif`.

It seems the vc-packager tries to parse these just as it would other tif files (and understandably so, though this is less than desirable).

Steps to reproduce

1. Extract the campfire.zip to a non-HFS disk (such as an external drive or samba share) on MacOS.
2. Attempt to run vc-packager against the unzipped data, such as vc_packager -s ./campfire/rec -v ./campfire.volpkg -u 104 -n campfire
3. Receive the described error.

Version

2.26.0-rc.3 (according to homebrew as vc_version doesn't exist in my install)

How did you install the software?

Homebrew

On which operating systems have you experienced this issue?

• [X] macOS
• [ ] Windows
• [ ] Linux

Relevant log output

No response

Code of Conduct

• [X] I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[csparker247]

This is not well documented, but packager supports a limited printf-style string to help parsing in situations like this:

vc_packager -s path/to/slices/slice_files_%3d.tif ...