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Meaning of the character '@' in output running 'ls -l'

I've been working with cron and crontab on MacO's Sonomia and the shell expansion for the standard data or DATE command today. Lost time in the end, because the last post in the thread https://serverfault.com/questions/45066/os-x-cron-and-environment-variables made me realize once again, MacOS is different and I can't compare it with Linux, the differences and peculiarities are serious. Well, I'll just write .plist files to do my tasks, if that's the way it should be.


I am in folder /Users/ME/Library/LaunchAgents, the output of 'ls -l' shows:


-rw-r--r--@ 1 ME staff 300 12 Dec 23:44 com.DigiDNA.iMazing2Mac.Mini.plist

-rw-r--r--@ 1 ME staff 485 25 Nov 08:51 com.adobe.connectDetector.plist

-rw-r--r--@ 1 ME staff 693 14 Dec 09:34 io.podman_desktop.PodmanDesktop.plist


My Linux knowledge should be solid by now, but I have to pass on the '@'.


Someone wrote somewhere, do 'ls -e'. According to the manpage (whereis ls) .. ls(1), '-e Print the Access Control List (ACL) associated with the file, if present, in long (-l) output.'. Then I try 'ls -l@':


-rw-r--r--@ 1 ME staff 300 12 Dec 23:44 com.DigiDNA.iMazing2Mac.Mini.plist

com.apple.provenance 11 


-rw-r--r--@ 1 ME staff 485 25 Nov 08:51 com.adobe.connectDetector.plist

com.apple.provenance 11 


-rw-r--r--@ 1 ME staff 693 14 Dec 09:34 io.podman_desktop.PodmanDesktop.plist

com.apple.provenance 11 


-rw-r--r--@ 1 ME staff 401 14 Dec 18:44 me.technology.dailyZshHistory.plist

com.apple.lastuseddate#PS 16 


And what does that tell me?

MacBook Pro (M2 Pro, 2023)

Posted on Dec 14, 2024 10:25 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Dec 16, 2024 7:15 AM

folkertmeeuw wrote:

I'm preparing for LPIC exams. In Numbers I do a compare sheet between OS (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, MacOS, Solaris) and the commands. Sheet has now 355 lines and I'm not finished yet.


For those platforms that meet The Open Group UNIX specs, you will have a subset of similarity.


Outside of that, they’ll often differ.


Having created a whole lot of platform comparison spreadsheets over the aeons, those spreadsheets are less than useful.


Outside of homework, that is.


For portable apps or when porting OSs I’ll usually go with a consistent subset of features from platform hardware and OS software, and from compilers, and a shim for the platform differences. Which unfortunately starts looking like any other platform portability layer; what amounts to a hardware abstraction layer or HAL.


355 is not even a fraction of the scale and scope.

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Meaning of the character '@' in output running 'ls -l'

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