Extended file attributes on macOS

You can store metadata on any file in the mac filesystem(HFS+). If you want to ensure the file has a specific encoding, or if you want to place a checksum with the file you can use file attributes.

Setting and reading are easy on macOS with the xattr utility:

> touch something.txt
> xattr -w xyz 123 something.txt
> xattr -p xyz something.txt
123

In this example we wrote(xattr -w) an attribute onto the file and printed it(xattr -p) to see that it was written.

You can list the file attributes with a cryptic option for ls, ls -l@. Try doing this on your ~/Downloads dir to learn something cool about how macOS treats files coming from the internet.

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