A traditional ‘resource fork’ containing resource structures, lumped into a binary xattr. Still commonly used for image previews, and found in many older files.
Category Archive: xattr
Standard layout and content template for xattr type pages here.
This UTF-8 string contains the Gatekeeper score, the system time of download, downloading agent, and the event UUID. Can force a full Gatekeeper check.
Indicates the encoding used for the contents of the text file, e.g. UTF-8, Macintosh, Windows-1252. Used in many text documents.
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.
