My free utility Precize started off with an unusual purpose: I realised that the Finder and command tools didn’t normally provide accurate figures for file sizes, including extended attributes, and wanted to find out real values for them. Since then it has grown into one of the most comprehensive suites of information about files and folders, which exceeds what even the advanced user can accomplish in Terminal.

For any given file or folder, it displays the following information:

• its full path
• its volfs path, which specifies that file or folder wherever it’s moved to on that volume, and can be used in Terminal
• its FileRefURL, which is similar to the volfs path but used internally by some macOS features
• the sizes of its data fork and extended attributes returned by two different macOS methods, and their totals
• its Posix permissions, given in octal, the most widely used format for the command line
• the owner and group, by name and by number
• its datestamp of creation and last modification
• its type and UTI
• its reference count, the number of file system entries including hard links which point to this directory entry
• its macOS Bookmark, which is used in parts of macOS such as Launch Services, and equates to a Finder Alias
• the path given in that Bookmark
• a listing of all its extended attributes.

To make it easier to copy and paste the most important of these, it offers six in shortcuts, which select and copy that item:

1. its full path
2. its volfs path
3. its FileRefURL
4. its Posix permissions in octal
5. its Bookmark
6. its extended attributes.

Press ⌘5 to copy the Bookmark from that and open its Resolver window, select the top view and ⌘V to paste that Bookmark data there. Then click on the Resolve button, and in the lower view you’ll see the complete contents of that Bookmark unscrambled. You can use that to decode Bookmarks embedded in Launch Services property lists, for example, which reveal what those Bookmarks point to. And if you want a quick look at the document pointed to by any Bookmark which it has resolved, click on the Preview button, or reveal it in the Finder instead.

Precize is a unique and indispensible tool for every Mac user, and the more advanced you get, the more useful it becomes.

Precize version 1.9 has several significant improvements, including control over text size in two of its views, inclusion in the auto-update system which I’ve set up for many of my apps, and it now remembers window sizes and positions. It’s available from here: precize19
from Downloads above, and from its own Product Page.

I hope that you find it as useful as I do.