Thirty years ago, many Macs were hit by the Wdef virus, which exploited a vulnerability which remains today: it travelled in an extended attribute. Should we be worried now?
xattr
So convenient to use – edit them in the Comments: section of Finder’s Get Info dialog. But as reliable as loose scraps of paper, and as easily lost.
Unlike file data, metadata has varying persistence. Some is ephemeral, others sticky. macOS has inbuilt mechanisms for managing the persistence of extended attributes.
Easy to access, well-supported in the Finder and elsewhere, Finder tags are powerful tools which rely on extended attributes to do their job. All you need to know about them.
Most quarantine flags in your Mac aren’t on apps but documents. Details of how they’re added, what info they contain, and what they do.
All about xattrs: their origin, where they’re stored, how they’re named and typed, how to find and work with them, and their common problems.
The equivalent of cmp, only it works on extended attributes rather than file data.
Fixes a minor bug, and now runs on all Macs, Intel and Apple Silicon, including Big Sur betas.
Supporting 16 different types of metadata, from Authors to Version, you don’t need to know how they are stored, etc.
Five different classes of metadata, from file system attributes to embedded Info.plist files, explained and explored.
