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Category Archive: xattr
They may not cause many problems, but xattrs are both very useful and extensively used by macOS and third-party products. It’s time to discover more, and document them.
Even a lean and simple High Sierra system has many xattrs of many types, and plenty of files still have ‘resource forks’. Plus details of some important xattrs used by Apple’s system files.
They’re almost invisible, but surprisingly widely used. xattrs come in very many different types, and contain valuable information. Here are results from analysing most of a Sierra startup volume.
NSDocument is based on the data stored in the data fork of a file. Could it be modified to work with xattrs instead? And dipping my toes into NSTableView.
Using wrappers to call C functions which give direct access to xattrs, handling throws, and converting arbitrary Data to Strings.
Working with extended attributes in Swift. They’re straightforward using shell commands, but that is not the best way ahead.
