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User profile for user: Greg Hodge
Greg Hodge Author
User level: Level 1
103 points

What's with the @ symbol in permissions

I don't recall seeing anything like this in pre-Leopard systems. After the upgrade to Leopard, many of my Terminal permissions listings now include the @ symbol at the end, as in drwxr-xr-x@. I'm not concerned or anything, just curious as to its meaning and any significance related to the new OS.

Thanks,
Greg

Intel Mini, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Oct 28, 2007 6:50 PM

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User profile for user: Anton Rang
Anton Rang
User level: Level 1
107 points

Posted on Oct 30, 2007 11:42 AM

Actually, "+" indicates the richer permission model (also known as ACLs).

The "@" sign -- which is not documented in the manual page for ls(1) -- indicates that the file has extended attributes. You can use the command 'xattr -l <filename>' to show them. It seems that a lot of Finder information, which ought to be stored in the catalog, is now in extended attributes. (Hmmm, or maybe it's actually still in the catalog file and just being exposed as extended attributes, which would make a lot of sense.)
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User profile for user: Anton Rang
Anton Rang
User level: Level 1
107 points

Oct 30, 2007 11:42 AM in response to Camelot

Actually, "+" indicates the richer permission model (also known as ACLs).

The "@" sign -- which is not documented in the manual page for ls(1) -- indicates that the file has extended attributes. You can use the command 'xattr -l <filename>' to show them. It seems that a lot of Finder information, which ought to be stored in the catalog, is now in extended attributes. (Hmmm, or maybe it's actually still in the catalog file and just being exposed as extended attributes, which would make a lot of sense.)
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User profile for user: ebsanford
ebsanford
User level: Level 1
9 points

Nov 8, 2007 6:30 AM in response to Greg Hodge

I have found that the @ symbol appears on directories (possibly files but I haven't looked) that I have changed the Finder's icon. If the following command is issued, the directory's icon will be reset to the default:

$ xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo <directoryName>
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User profile for user: Camelot
Camelot
User level: Level 9
56,487 points

Oct 28, 2007 7:31 PM in response to Greg Hodge

Mac OS X supports multiple permission models - there's the standard set of owner/group/other and read/write/execute, and a richer set that allows more fine-grained control.

ls uses the @ sign to indicate files are using the richer set and therefore what you're seeing is only part of the picture. You can use the -e switch to display the extended permissions.
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What's with the @ symbol in permissions

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