MacOS – What does these extended attributes mean and where are they documented

extended-attributesmacosterminaltime-machine

For some reason a directory I had (Vundle.vim) got randomly copied to another directory (got copied from ~/.vim to ~/dotfiles/.vim with strange permissions and what looks like no contents. Anyways, when I ran 

ls -l Vundle.vim

I got

drw-r--r--@ 11 root  staff  374 Aug 14 20:22 Vundle.vim

and when I ran

xattr -l Vundle.vim/

this is what I got

xattr -l Vundle.vim/
com.apple.backupdelta.creationMarker: yes
com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineNewestSnapshot:
00000000  62 70 6C 69 73 74 30 30 33 41 BB 7E B4 DA 00 00  |bplist003A.~....|
00000010  00 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000020  00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000030  00 11                                            |..|
00000032
com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineOldestSnapshot:
00000000  62 70 6C 69 73 74 30 30 33 41 BB 7E 82 12 00 00  |bplist003A.~....|
00000010  00 08 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000020  00 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000030  00 11                                            |..|
00000032
inodeForCreationOriginal: 10315546

Can anybody tell me what this output means or where I can find that information (some sort of documentation)?

Best Answer

All commandline apps have an associated man page, that explain input and output, invoked like this:

man [command]

Where [command] is the command you want help on. So to find info on ls:

man ls

Also Mac OS is based on BSD unix and not completely different from Linux. So googling for the man page on almost any (BSD/Linux) unix command will also lead you to (quite possibly) more info that you can possibly digest...

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