MacOS – How to give a file the com.apple.quarantine attribute on mac

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.

You need to add the direct path to the file in your command to remove it permanently:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /complete/path/to/tasks.taskpaper

If this fails, there may be multiple instances. Attempt to globally remove it amongst all versions:

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