finder-tagmacos
In OS X X.9 Mavericks, I'd like to add a colored tag to my apache config file, which is under /private/etc/apache2, and to my apache log files, which are under /priavte/var/log
I do not have the option to add a colored tag to these files.
Is it because they are "hidden"? Or does it have to do with file ownership? Is there a workaround?
You can't get there from the tag view accessed from the sidebar, but if you navigate to the directory you want to search, and type the tag you're looking for, it will find files in that directory.
Most of the time the OS X upgrade routines work quite reliably and in this case there shouldn't be any deal-breakers like Rosetta back in the days. However, it is impossible to tell for sure. What I usually do, is to clone my system to either a second partition in the internal drive or to an external (USB) drive (using a tool like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner).
After booting the clone (press alt in the boot screen) you can safely upgrade this partition to a newer version of OS X and play with it for a while. Once you are sure everything works, you can either copy it back to your main partition or upgrade that one too.
Nevertheless, I recommend to have another (e.g. TimeMachine) backup available, in case anything goes wrong.
Best Answer
The files are owned by root and Finder runs as the user, so Finder is not allowed to modify the tags.
As a workaround, you can run Finder as root:
Or use tag or xattr:
brew install tag;sudo tag -s $'Red\n6' /etc/apache2/httpd.confsudo xattr -w com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags '("Red\n6")' /etc/apache2/httpd.conf;sudo xattr -wx com.apple.FinderInfo '00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0C 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00' /etc/apache2/httpd.conf