Terribly Annoying

Leopard has its fair share of annoyances. The biggest annoyance are the prompts that you recieve when you download archives or binary executables. Behind the scenes, the OS appends extended attributes to files that you download and then will pester you incessantly about it.

While most believe that Mac OS X is a secure platform, you have to wonder about the level of confidence that Apple has in their own product when they begin creating extended attributes named “com.apple.quarantine” which they append to everything you download.

Searching for solutions to my plight, I came upon this little gem.

on adding folder items to thisFolder after receiving addedItems repeat with anItem in addedItems set anItem's contents to (quoted form of POSIX path of (anItem as alias)) end repeat set AppleScript's text item delimiters to " " do shell script "xattr -d com.apple.quarantine " & (addedItems as text)

I’m not really a fan of AppleScript since I rarely use the Finder, so I decided to dispose of the extra cruft (AppleScript) and address the problem directly.

find ~/Downloads/ -exec xattr -d com.apple.quarantine {} \;

I plan on submitting this to the CLIX database later.