MacOS – com.apple.quarantine extended attribute gets re-added each time I open the file

I need to learn proper xattr usage.

Apparently, xattr has a "clear" (-c) command that can be applied using a wildcard (*), as follows,

xattr -cr *

This results in a recursive removal of all ._AppleDouble files from the current folder on down (the -r flag does recursive, while the -c flag clears them), thus making the process a trivial one line command.

This does not however clear out the .DS_Store files. For that, you can employ the good old "find" command:

find . -type f -name .DS_Store -delete

This will find and delete any .DS_Store files from the current directory on down (recursively).

Lastly, we can bring it all together in the form of an alias that is called upon by simply typing "xat" (put the following in your .bash_profile):

alias xat='find . -type f -name .DS_Store -delete && xattr -cr *'

Now just run "xat" on any directory and it'll strip those pesky resource forks and remove those irritating .DS_Store files from anything inside of it.

find . -iname '*.webarchive' -print0 | xargs -0 xattr -d com.apple.quarantine

• will remove (xattr -d) the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute
• from all files with an extension of .webarchive (-iname '*.webarchive')
• located in the current directory and its subdirectories (. -depth, where the -depth is implied)
• going through xargs (-print0 | xargs -0) to avoid problems with filenames containing spaces and other special characters (a similiar goal can be accomplished with slightly reduced efficiency by using find . -iname '*.webarchive' -exec xattr -d '{}' \;).

Explanation of the efficiency difference:

Whenever the syntax allows for it such as in this case, xargs assembles one or more command lines such as xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/file1.webarchive /path/to/fileN.webarchive

while the in-my-opinion easier to remember find-only version repeats the command every time: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/file1.webarchive ; xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/fileN.webarchive