MacOS – Terminal command to remove custom icon from file (HFS+)

command linefilesystemfinderhfs+macos

Context

In Mac OS X / macOS you can select a file in the Finder, click Informations then click the icon, and paste any image/icon that is in the clipboard. Now this file has a custom icon made of this image.

To remove it, the usual way is to select the file, click Informations, select the custom icon then hit delete and it removes the custom icon, restoring the default one.

Question

Is there a way to remove these custom icons from these files without having to open a Finder window? For example with a Terminal command?

Why

A file has a corrupted custom icon, opening the Finder in this folder causes the Finder to beachball and the HDD to freak out. But I still can access the folder content, and this file, from the command line, if I don't first open a Finder window. So I'm thinking that I "just" need to access the metadata differently to remove the custom icon.

Best Answer

For files with a custom icon, macOS writes the icon data as a resource fork to the file. Use the xattr command in the following form:

xattr -d com.apple.ResourceFork /path/to/filename

For more information about the xattr command, in Terminal type the following command and press: enter

man xattr

Or just type xattr and then right-click on it and select: Open man Page

For folders with custom icon, in Terminal, change directory to the folder containing the custom icon, e.g.:

cd /path/to/foo

Once in the directory, use the following command to remove the custom icon:

rm Icon?

Note that you can also just use:

rm /path/to/foo/Icon?

However, you cannot use quotes, single or double, if the pathname has spaces and must escape the spaces with a backslash, \, e.g.:

rm /path/to/foo\ bar/Icon?

Quoting the pathname will just return the following error:

: No such file or directory

By default, Icon? is a hidden file and the ? in Icon? is actually a linefeed, \n, character.

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to remove the Finder icon from the Dock

There is no easy way to do this, but there is a little hack :)

Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/
Backup DockMenus.plist
Open DockMenus.plist in your favorite text editor with root access

Find section finder-running and add new sub-section

<dict>
    <key>command</key>
    <integer>1004</integer>
    <key>name</key>
    <string>REMOVE_FROM_DOCK</string>
</dict>

or just Download my version of DockMenus.plist

In plist editor file should look like this:
Open Terminal and run killall Dock.
Right click on Finder icon in Dock - Bingo!

p.s After Dock restart (manual relaunch or mac reboot) you need manually remove Finder icon from Dock

MacOS – How to assign a custom icon from a graphic file to another file in Lion

When Preview fails, I turn to the Web Browser, master of all filetypes.

Open the image in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox by dragging it to the app's icon or using
File-> Open.

Right click on the image and choose Copy Image (be careful not to use Copy Image URL or Copy Image Location).

From there, use the standard procedure of pasting into the Get Info window.

If the image you want to use is a PDF, you'll need to create a rasterized version that you can copy from the web browser. You can still use Preview for this: open the PDF, choose File-> Export and set the format to PNG. You can open the exported version and copy that.