cp leads to "error processing extended attributes: Argument list too long"

Well, I tried to reproduce it. I even pasted a whole 3 page article in as one of the notes. cp still copied it without complaint.

Do you have /bin/cp at the head of your path? If it is fink's /sw/bin/cp or some such thing, you don't have a hfs+-aware cp. But then I would think it wouldn't know enough to complain about extended attributes.

Woops. Sorry, I do get the error. I didn't read what you had written carefully enough.

It looks like the notes got copied anyway.


Jul 7 20:17:05 laptop-wgs cp: error processing extended attributes: Operation not permitted

Bill

Are you sure you are getting this message from a manual use of cp?

This message will appear in system.log every time a periodic task is run. It is caused by the line:

cp /dev/null $tmp_output

and the fix is simple:

sudo -s
cd /usr/sbin
mv periodic periodic.orig
sed 's@cp /dev/null@>@' periodic.orig > periodic
chmod +x,u-w periodic
exit

You can tell if this is the cause of your error by comparing the time in system.log with the output of ls -l /var/log/*.out which will tell you when periodic last ran.

However, this is not the same as Derick's message. Not seen that before.

My version of Skim (0.5) stores notes in a separate file. I didn't see a preference for storing them in the extended attributes - is that a hidden preference?

Hi Derick,

error processing extended attributes: Argument list too long

I have no idea why you get this error when copying a file...

There is a max size for each extended attribute (about 3800bytes), and if I try to create (by using a simple C program) an attribute larger than this limit then I get "Argument list too long" error. But in your case you are trying to make a copy of an existing PDF file whose extended attributes should be smaller than the limit, of course (Skim has no magical power of creating an attribute larger than the limit; if the note is too large then I guess Skim just splits the note into two or more attributes).

Q1: do you get the error only if you (try to) copy a PDF file with large notes? or you also get the error for a file with only small notes? How about a PDF file with many small notes?

Q2: are you copying the PDF file to external volumes? If so, are you sure it is HFS+? What happens if you copy the PDF file to the same internal disk volume, for example

cp your.pdf tmp.pdf

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