Monday, January 11, 2010

Fixing Ghosted File

Just a few weeks old on the Mac and I already experienced a peculiar situation twice. It's been fun configuring the Mac and getting it as close as possible to my previous Windows dexterity as possible though it's been a lot of distractions too.

On moving files sometimes especially unto a destination NTFS partition, I realised some of the files moved are ghosted. I investigated and discovered this is due to incomplete copy operation. In my situation, the copy process probably did not clean up successfully after the copy. Why will this happen? I already lost files to this previously as I am left with no choice but to delete such files.

This time I had to make sure these files these files are recovered. On googl(e)ing, I learn about undisplayed file attributes of Unix and Mac files. Also learn that tools like RixStep ACP XFiles tools help with controlling such attributes. A single use license cost about $59.

Later I learn about the SetFile tool bundled with the XCode tools. An accompanying GetFileInfo tool will give

$ GetFileInfo [file name]


Screen shot 2010-01-11 at 14.55.48.png


this is what's shown for Normal files. In my case I had "brok" as type and "MACS" as creator.

This can be corrected by using Send File as below

$ SetFile -c "" -t "" [file name]


Knowing myself not to be able to remember this months down the line, I added this to my .profile file under the unghostfile alias.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

Unknown said...

This is a lot better than some chinx trying to advertise sextoid and viagra on my blog comments. Thanks for the comment.