What does the @ mean on the output of "ls" on OS X' terminal?

When doing an ls in a directory I get the following output:

drwxr-xr-x@ 12 xonic staff 408 22 Jun 19:00 . drwxr-xr-x 9 xonic staff 306 22 Jun 19:42 .. -rwxrwxrwx@ 1 xonic staff 6148 25 Mai 23:04 .DS_Store -rw-r--r--@ 1 xonic staff 17284 22 Jun 00:20 filmStrip.cpp -rw-r--r--@ 1 xonic staff 3843 21 Jun 21:20 filmStrip.h 

I was wondering what the @ means.

8 Answers

It indicates that the file has extended attributes. Use ls -l@ to see them.

You can use xattr to edit these attributes. xattr -h will give you the inline help for it.

Off the top of my head, I think is has something to do with the file having extended attributes available. Here's a link to a similar discussion:

So if you see a file with an "@" when you do an ls, try doing this:

xattr -l <filename> 

That should show you the extended attributes.

You can check xattr's help for more details:

xattr --help usage: xattr [-l] file [file ...] xattr -p [-l] attr_name file [file ...] xattr -w attr_name attr_value file [file ...] xattr -d attr_name file [file ...] The first form lists the names of all xattrs on the given file(s). The second form (-p) prints the value of the xattr attr_name. The third form (-w) sets the value of the xattr attr_name to attr_value. The fourth form (-d) deletes the xattr attr_name. options: -h: print this help -l: print long format (attr_name: attr_value) 

It seems like if you look at the extra attributes with "-l" and then remove them with "-d" it'll probably do what you want. Practice this in a temporary directory somewhere first though and make sure it works ;)

From the ls(1) man page on Mac OS 10.6.1:

If the file or directory has extended attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '@' character. Otherwise, if the file or directory has extended security information (such as an access control list), the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '+' character.

From the available options list:

 -@ Display extended attribute keys and sizes in long (-l) output. -e Print the Access Control List (ACL) associated with the file, if present, in long (-l) output. 

These will let you see the value of those extended options. FWIW, ACL info can be set using the same chmod(1) utility you are probably already aware of. :-)

There doesn't appear to be an easy way from the command line to do anything with extended attributes.

From the man page for ls:

If the -l option is given, the following information is displayed for each file: file mode, number of links, owner name, group name, number of bytes in the file, abbreviated month, day-of-month file was last modified, hour file last modified, minute file last modified, and the pathname.

In addition, for each directory whose contents are displayed, the total number of 512-byte blocks used by the files in the directory is displayed on a line by itself, immediately before the information for the files in the directory.

If the file or directory has extended attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '@' character. Otherwise, if the file or directory has extended security information (such as an access control list), the permissions field printed by the -l option is fol-lowed followed lowed by a '+' character.

Use:

ls -la@e 

for more information on files or directories with those attributes/information.

This is related to extended attributes and access control.

From the man page of sun ls:

The character after permissions is an ACL or extended attributes indicator. This character is an @ if extended attributes are associated with the file and the -@ option is in effect. Otherwise, this character is a plus sign (+) character if a non-trivial ACL is associated with the file or a space character if not.

From the man page of ls:

The Long Format
[…] If the file or directory has extended attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '@' character. […]

The "@" means that the file has "extended attributes" associated with it.

If you do "ls -@ -l", you can see what attributes there are for each file. You can also do something like "xattr -l pgsql.so" to dump the attributes for a particular file.

Typically they're stuff like old-school FinderInfo, text encoding info, or the "quarantine" info that gives you the "This file was downloaded from the web, are you sure you want to open it?" warning.

-la or -al in command ls -la has the following things to add in ls

l adds following options to -la

a option instead adds the hidden files.

Answer to one of the merged questions : ls -la symbolics... what does that last symbol mean?