Welcome to the Tweaking4All community forums!
When participating, please keep the Forum Rules in mind!
Topics for particular software or systems: Start your topic link with the name of the application or system.
For example “MacOS X – Your question“, or “MS Word – Your Tip or Trick“.
Please note that switching to another language when reading a post will not bring you to the same post, in Dutch, as there is no translation for that post!
[Solved] Extended Attributes - What does the "@" symbol mean in macOS file attributes
(@hans)
Famed Member Admin
Joined: 12 years ago
Posts: 2854
Topic starter
January 19, 2022 7:41 AM
Short version: it indicates that there are extended attributes for this file, which are not displayed by default.
You can make them visible with
ls -@l
or
xattr <filename>
The extended attributes can have several purposes, but for example can hold meta data like that the file was downloaded from a certain website, or that certain access rights are allowed or denied ... etc.
I wouldn't recommend doing so, but you can actually clear/remove all the extended attributes:
xattr -c <filename>
Or remove just one of them:
xattr -d <attribute> <filename>