PSA: Disable and Recover from Mac OS X’s Quarantine

rentzsch:

Someone tweeted:

Does anyone have a service (Automator??) that removes the xattr quarantine flag from selected files and folders? I realize the danger….

While I tweeted my response, I wanted to get this information out to a wider audience.

Here’s how to put to sleep Mac OS X’s Quarantine yapping-dog.

First, slice off the head of the beast. Ken Aspeslagh taught me this one:

To totally disable quarantine: defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool NO (and reboot)

Slayage successful, but you still have its malodorous droppings (com.apple.quarantine extended attributes) gumming up your machine and workflow.

New in 10.6, xattr has a recurse option:

xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads

If you’re still on 10.5, you’ll have a little more work to do:

find ~/Downloads -type df -exec xattr -d com.apple.quarantine {} \;

If you find yourself missing the old quarantine dog, click here to run a simulator (Javascript required).

Update: Harkening to the original poster, Nick Peelman wrote a service for removing files or entire folders from quarantine.

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   Quarantine… Essentially run...defaults command...disable new...

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