I was trying to remove extended attributes (quarantine) in order to install Fusion. This is what I ran in terminal:
sudo xattr -rc /Volumes/VMware\ Fusion/VMware\ Fusion.app
Apparently, the instruction was applied to /Volumes instead of just the app. In consequence, lots of troubles appeared after a restart:
- characters are not being displayed (only question marks inside a box)
- permissions or ownership of lots of folders and files were messed up
- chaos
I would like to know why this happened and if there's any way to revert it back to default. I tried to run RepairHomePermissions from recovery mode as describe here: macOS Sierra Recovery HD Changes but it didn't help. With a different system user everything works fine so I don't know if only the home folder was affected.
Best Answer
If you really entered the command as shown, the change should be local to
VMware Fusion.app. But anyway, if you want to restore things back to sanity, you can