The Burbank Diet!

It's easy! It's painless! No carbs, no tags!

Get It Try It

% xattr -crsv *

Note that you might want to run this as well.

% xattr -crsv .*

Or to put both together.

% xattr -crsv *; xattr -crsv .*

Or if you want to target a specific directory.

% xattr -crsv ~/Downloads

And so forth.

The 'c' clears all XAs. The 'r' means it goes recursive. The 's' means it acts on symlinks themselves rather than their references. And the 'v' stands for 'verbose'.

It's all right there on your disk all the time.

% whereis xattr
/usr/bin/xattr

All you have to do is run that on each and every download. That's it.

And you're free. You've escaped Seahaven Island. Reality is yours again.

Rixstep's appleclean builds on the above premise and goes a step or two further. As things stand, you can incorporate those additional features into a script of your own. The future is ours to see, which is why appleclean is open-ended. But as things stand:

1. Remove all file flags.
2. Loosen up permissions.
3. Remove all XAs.
4. Restore permissions.

Note the above four operations are recursive in nature. Note as well you don't need the additional '.*' to get at all files. In fact, you don't need to specify any command line arguments at all: appleclean does its own 'low-level' filesytem directory enumeration to get at everything.

Creating a complete script to cover all the above is left as an exercise to the reader. The source code to appleclean, eminently straightforward, may be released in the future. Although, because the code is so straightforward, it should be simple to recreate.

About Rixstep

Stockholm/London-based Rixstep are a constellation of programmers and support staff from Radsoft Laboratories who tired of Windows vulnerabilities, Linux driver issues, and cursing x86 hardware all day long. Rixstep have many years of experience behind their efforts, with teaching and consulting credentials from the likes of British Aerospace, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Lloyds TSB, SAAB Defence Systems, British Broadcasting Corporation, Barclays Bank, IBM, Microsoft, and Sony/Ericsson.

Rixstep and Radsoft products are or have been in use by Sweden's Royal Mail, Sony/Ericsson, the US Department of Defense, the offices of the US Supreme Court, the Government of Western Australia, the German Federal Police, Verizon Wireless, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Microsoft Corporation, the New York Times, Apple Inc, Oxford University, and hundreds of research institutes around the globe. See here.

All Content and Software Copyright © Rixstep. All Rights Reserved.