Tag Archives: featured

quarantined file issues in Mavericks OSX

Ok, so ever since I upgraded to Mavericks from Mountain Lion, I’ve had crazy issues dealing with font files that I’ve downloaded. At first, I thought it might be some sort of font issue with Mavericks, but it turns out it’s a quarantine issue with downloaded files.

For a bit now, OSX quarantines files that are downloaded. It’s a nice security feature, but dang, it’s really messing me up :/ I’m not sure yet why my box is behaving this way. I’m sure there’d be massive outcry if this were a rampant issue.

When a file is downloaded, some extra meta is added to it. You can tell from the command line as the permissions look something like this when you list all aka ‘ls -la’ …

drwxr-xr-x@

The work around I’ve pieced together that I have to do each time I download a zip file is to unpack it, then run xattr on it to remove the quarantine flag. Here’s an example of a style.css file that I ran this on to allow scripts on my box to see the file.


xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine style.css

or

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine style.css

What should happen is when I click to unzip the zip file, I should get a GUI alert that asks me if I really want to open this file from the internet. Sadly, it’s not happening on my box.

Anyway, hope this helps the random person out there searching for a possible solution.

Update: 4/16/14

It would be helpful to let you know how to actually find the bit of data to remove. Above you see com.app.quarantine. That’s the metadata you need to remove. To find it simply type…


xattr somefilename

That’ll output a string which you’d put in place of ‘com.apple.quarantine’ as seen above.

Change read status of all gmail messages at once

Sometimes I’m called upon to set up a Google business apps account and migrate folks emails over. What can happen, depending upon how you do this is that you get thousand of emails in the inbox that are unread. Needless to say, the client doesn’t really have that many new emails. You can’t go in one by one and mark them as read. I just found a nice little post that shows you how to create a filter in gmail to handle all your email status’ at once!

  1. Go to your Settings/Filters page and create a new filter.
  2. In the Has the words field enter “is:unread” (without quotes), and click the Next Step button.
  3. You’ll get a message warning you that this type of filter won’t be applied to new mail, but that’s OK. Click OK to continue.
  4. Check the boxes next to Mark as read and Also apply filter to … conversations below.
  5. Click Create Filter button, and you’re done. You might want to should delete the filter once you finish since it won’t be needing it anymore.

Here’s the original source:
http://www.apejet.org/aaron/blog/2008/06/08/gmail-tip-mark-all-unread-mail-as-read/

ZIP issues on WordPress plugin updates

So, today I was helping out a colleague with some WordPress installations. When adding plugins or updating ones that were there, I encountered this well commented but not resolved error…

PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature

Now, there’s a bunch of folks talking about this issue, with solutions ranging from not enough disk space, to permissions issues.

This issue occurred for me on a mediatemple grid server. I was not able to upload or upgrade any WordPress plugins on new or older versions of WordPress. This occurred in WordPress installs that did not have this problem before. Further, if I was on the server via the commandline, I could scp the zip files up and unzip them. The issue was only within the WordPress GUI. So, my guess is whatever process WordPress uses to unzip plugins is what’s causing the problem.

I’m pretty sure that the issue came about when the ZIP package was globally updated on the server recently. Since the php.ini file for the account was customized in some way, and it didn’t reference the correct zip extension, unpacking zip files via the WordPress GUI failed.

When I added ‘extension = zip.so’ to the php.ini file, this resolved the issue. I don’t know that this is the perfect solution for anyone else, but just another data point for folks looking for info.

Hope this helps someone out there 🙂