Massive bump to @IlyaB, I was stumped trying to get the full 5gb Install MacOS High Sierra.app but was stuck with the 19mb stub version.
My Process to get a working app that is currently making my bootable USB for High Sierra
1: Go to Mac App Store and download High Sierra (the 19mb stub)
2: Click Continue in the installer app once it downloads
3: Choose your boot disk (or any disk that has space)
4: Allow the installer to download (this is the contents of the missing "SharedSupport" folder within the installer stub)
5: The installer will prompt you to restart after finishing the 5gb download, at this point quit the installer and do not restart your system!
6: Go to your root (or whichever location you chose in step 3) and find the folder "macOS Install Data"
7: Copy the contents of that folder disregarding .DS_Store
(9 files, folders, dmgs, pkgs, and plists)
8: Go to your Applications folder where the Mac App Store downloaded the stub version of "Install macOS High Sierra"
9: Right Click on that file and "Show Package Contents"
10: Within the Contents folder, create a new folder called "SharedSupport"
11: Paste the files you copied earlier from the installer download
12: And you're done! You should have a fully functional Installer file for bootable USB drives or just copying to other systems whether they be offline, or you just don't want to download the installer over and over.
I am currently in the lengthy process of creating a bootable USB drive to make a Coffee Lake i7 8700k Hackintosh build. I'm following this guide with the recommended motherboard. I'll try to update here with my success/ failure.
At the moment, it seems there are two answers to your question. The one answer is exactly the method you've laid out above (or the equivalent of removing the database at /var/folders/
). The other option is... you can't.
With High Sierra, most - if not all - flash storage-based Macs had their file system upgraded to APFS from HFS+. Now, I haven't exhaustively read Apple's documentation on APFS but there is one item in the FAQ that sticks out to me which reads:
Calling readdir(2)
on a directory in APFS returns filenames in hash order, whereas HFS+ returns filenames in lexicographical order.
[Source: Apple Developer Documentation]
The defaults
trick technically still works. On HFS+ disks in High Sierra it still works as expected (tested by myself). On an APFS formatted drive you can see that it does something in that it resets the order but just not alphabetically. The order, then, is most likely arranged by the hash of the apps' names and not by the names themselves.
The solution for APFS? All I can think of right now is using a database tool to manually sort the entries in to alphabetical order. But then again, might as well just drag and drop...
Best Answer
See this site and this one for some background.
If you’re trying to find out this info to create profiles for managed Macs to handle new security restrictions when installing kernel extensions, there are numerous discussions on JAMF and Meraki user and support fora.