(There are multiple URL entries due to the fact that some browsers preserve the path you traversed to get to the final download.) ![]() Mutate(where_from = map(contents, biplist$readPlistFromString)) %>% List.files("~/Downloads", full.names = TRUE) %>%įilter(name = ":kMDItemWhereFroms") %>% Now we can focus on the task at hand: recovering the URLs: I highly recommended using Python 3.x vs 2.x, though. You’ll need to install the biplist module via pip3 install bipist or pip install bipist depending on your setup. I like to prime the Python setup with invisible(py_config()) but that is not really necessary (I do it mostly b/c I have a wild number of Python - don’t judge - installs and use the RETICULATE_PYTHON env var for the one I use with R). There will eventually be a native Rust-backed property list reading package for R, but we can work with that binary plist data in two ways: first, via the read_bplist() function that comes with the xattrs package and wraps Linux/BSD or macOS system utilities (which are super expensive since it also means writing out data to a file each time) or turn to Python which already has this capability. The general practice of Safari (and other browsers) is to use a binary property list to store metadata in the value component of an extended attribute (at least for these URL references). So, we can kinda figure out the URL but it’s definitely not pretty. We can try to read it as a string, though: Why “raw”? Well, as noted above, the value component of these attributes can store anything and this one definitely has embedded nuls ( 0x00) in it. Get_xattr_raw("~/Downloads/RStudio-1.2.627.dmg", ":kMDItemWhereFroms") This is the key Apple has standardized on to store the source URL of a downloaded item. There are four keys we can poke at, but the one that will help transition us to a larger example is :kMDItemWhereFroms. Library(tidyverse) # we'll need this later Library(reticulate) # not 100% necessary but you'll see why later We’re not going to work with the entire package in this post (it’s really straightforward to use and has a README on the GitHub site along with extensive examples) but I’ll use one of the example files from the directory listing above to demonstrate a couple functions before we get to the main example.įirst, let’s see what is hidden with the RStudio disk image: Let’s use the xattrs package to rebuild a list of download URLs from the extended attributes on the files located in ~/Downloads (if you’ve chosen a different default for your browsers, use that directory). ![]() ![]() We grab papers, data, programs (etc.) and some of those actions are performed in browsers. Exploring Past Downloadsĭata scientists are (generally) inquisitive folk and tend to accumulate things. ![]() You can work with extended attributes from the terminal with the xattr command, but do you really want to go to the terminal every time you want to examine these secret settings (now that you know your OS is keeping secrets from you)? When you’re in a terminal session you can tell that a file has extended attributes by looking for an sign near the permissions column: Apart from that, you can put anything in the value: text, binary content, etc. They key must be a character value & unique, and it’s fairly standard practice to keep the value component under 4K. For instance, macOS uses them to identify when files have passed through the Gatekeeper or to store the URLs of files that were downloaded via Safari (though most other browsers add the :kMDItemWhereFroms attribute now, too).Īttributes are nothing more than a series of key/value pairs. These attributes can serve useful purposes. One of these ways is by associating extended file attributes with files. Most modern operating systems keep secrets from you in many ways.
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