Unable to clear quarantine

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Level 1

114 points

Unable to clear quarantine

I'm writing a preference pane at the moment and I'm delighted to say that it works perfectly on Leopard. It even installs perfectly on Leopard - provided that another version isn't already installed. If it finds another version of itself then it fails to install the new version and it disables the old one - it does not display an error dialogue though. Examining the console reveals the following error: 'Unable to clear quarantine'

I was wondering if anyone else had experienced this problem and, if so, how they solved it.

Black MacBook 2GHz Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.1), G4 1.6GHz Dual, eMate, LC III, Apple IIe, ThinkPad T60, 10GB iPod, SE/30

Posted on Nov 23, 2007 3:28 PM

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Answer 1

etresoft

Level 8

46,098 points

Nov 23, 2007 5:51 PM in response to Buggins Turn

You need to clear the quarantine extended attribute via "xattr -d com.apple.quarantine". Apparently, there isn't a man page for xattr. You'll have to do "xattr --help". I'm guessing you'll have to do this via an installer script.

I found this information at: http://henrik.nyh.se/2007/10/lift-the-leopard-download-quarantine

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Answer 2

Buggins Turn Author

Level 1

114 points

Nov 24, 2007 1:38 AM in response to etresoft

Thanks for this. It doesn't quite help though, because I'd like to avoid the need to use an installer at all. I notice that Diablotin doesn't seem to fall foul of Quarantine - very strange.

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Answer 3

etresoft

Level 8

46,098 points

Nov 24, 2007 2:09 PM in response to Buggins Turn

I just tried Diablotin and it generated the same quarantine message. I didn't really try to run it so I don't know if it would have done anything. I do know that when I installed MySQL, the preference pane didn't actually run. I didn't take the time to debug it, I just used a launchd file for MySQL instead.

I don't really understand the quarantine concept I guess. Perhaps it just prevents an app from using admin privileges.

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Answer 4

Buggins Turn Author

Level 1

114 points

Nov 26, 2007 5:39 AM in response to etresoft

Okay. I've solved the problem - it seems that Quarantine was a bit of a false alarm. The problem was merely that Locamatic had an incorrect info.plist. I corrected the entry for CFBundleIdentifier and the problem was solved. Quarantine warning is still raised in Console, but Locamatic can now install, update and run - so the Quarantine warning doesn't present a problem.

Thanks for your help.

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