Archive of February 2011

Mac OS X: remove quarantine status from files

Posted on 2011-02-05 08:34:58

On Mac OS X, downloaded files (via Firefox) have an extended attribute on their file permissions, visible by the ‘@’:

[bianca@charon Downloads]$ ls -l Zend*
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bianca  staff   3738873 Feb  4 19:17 ZendFramework-1.11.3-minimal.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--@ 1 bianca  staff  20025817 Feb  4 19:17 ZendFramework-1.11.3.tar.gz

These extended attributes can be shown with xattr:

[bianca@charon Downloads]$ xattr -l ZendFramework-1.11.3-minimal.tar.gz
com.apple.quarantine: 0000;4cf55482;Firefox.app;|org.mozilla.firefox

OS X sometimes asks whether it’s safe to open these files. To make things worse, unzipping or untarring such a downloaded file applies the extended attribute to all extracted files…

To get rid of it on a per-file basis:

xattr -d FILE

To recursively remove the attribute from all files/directories:

find . | xargs xattr -d com.apple.quarantine
Posted in: Computers, OS X