Removing Leopard download quarantine

May 09, 2008 (mid-afternoon)

MacOSX Leopard tags files downloaded from the web with a special metadata bit.  This bit is later referenced to warn about running downloaded apps and scripts. Even archived files maintain this tag through the compression/decompress process.

I needed to update the firmware on my Canon PowerShot SD1000 camera and couldn’t get the camera to recognize the file.  Turns out the com.apple.quarantine xattribute was set.  To fix:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine *.FIR

xattr does not have a man entry.  Use:

xattr -h

I found most of my information on this helpful post.

Original article content:

posted in: Mac Tips Troubleshooting Unix

comments on this post:

phripley said:
May 09, 2008 (late at night)

Were you installing chdk?  Was thinking of trying it out on my PowerShot too.  How did it go?

http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

dfbills's avatar
dfbills said:
May 10, 2008 (late at night)

Right you are!  It went very well once I figured out why I couldn’t get the firmware menu to work. 

Too bad you can’t read those RAW files with any of the regular Apple software.  I need to read up more on it, but even Photoshop couldn’t read them.

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