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Applications moved by Alfred to /Applications are marked as read-only


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One of my most common Alfred actions is moving things from ~/Downloads to different folders. An especially common case is moving an application I download (usually decompressed from a .zip) to the /Applications folder.

 

I've set up a new MacBook Pro from scratch and have been using Alfred to copy apps to the Applications folder, and have seen one particularly weird thing with all the applications I've had Alfred move there: they all report some variant of the same error when launching or doing their Sparkle self-update check, saying "I'm on a read-only volume, so updating won't succeed".

 

Has anyone else seen this? Is this macOS being weird, Alfred being weird, (some weird xattrs being set? probably… ), or is something else responsible?

 

(I've fixed it by manually copying the applications to my Desktop, deleting the copy in /Apps, and moving it back via drag and drop.)

 

My config:

 

- 2017 MacBook Pro

- Alfred 3.4

- macOS Sierra, 10.12.6

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@cbowns try doing an xattr -rc /path/to/app to remove all extended attributes before copying it to /Applications. This should work absolutely fine, and something I've been doing for quite some time with various things.


Interestingly, a while back, I started deploying Alfred in a signed dmg instead of a zip, as recommended by Apple - Apps packaged inside a signed dmg are not translocated by macOS.

 

It's unlikely Alfred's move command will remove the extended attributes, as it would sidestep a default feature added by Apple.

 

Cheers,

Andrew

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  • 1 year later...

Another note on this, some apps -- Little Snitch, in my example -- have issues with Translocated apps. It can't set firewall rules for the app because it looks like each launched instance of the app is actually a temporary copy of that app.

 

I just have to remember not to use Alfred to 'Move to... /Applications' when I have an app in my Downloads folder. No big deal, but it would be great if Alfred either a) warned me, b) moved it properly, or c) just flat-out refused to move the file.

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