[ale] debugging a Mac snafu

arxaaron arxaaron at gmail.com
Mon Jun 4 19:49:21 EDT 2012


I want to add a thanks to Billy for the tip on using Go: Go To Folder  
menu
item to see and access "hidden" directories  from the Finder GUI.  One
of those little things that I'd never noticed or explored.

BTW, the "hidden" bit is one of the eXtended ATTRibutes that you can
see and set and change and remove from the shell with the xattr command.
I discovered these features when a friend had a file that Windows had
written onto an external drive that he then couldn't delete. Somehow the
system was seeing a "permanent" attribute as being set on the file.

And hopefully that bit above (pun intended of course) was new news to
someone else.

in peace
aaron





On 2012/06/04, at 15:37 , Passauer, Billy wrote:

> Hi Sean,
>
> With regard to trying to burn a DVD of the Library folder -- are you  
> trying to burn /Library or ~/Library ?  If the latter, temporary/ 
> cache files are getting created/deleted from this directory.  Lots  
> of programs use this directory to store/update preferences.  Maybe  
> do as previously suggested and create an iso first and then burn the  
> iso.  Or make a duplicate of the directory, and burn the duplicate?
>
> You should be able to read the system logs via the Console  
> application, which is located in /Applications/Utilities
>
> As far as getting the "GUI file manager" (Finder?) to display the  
> contents of /var - if you open the "Go" menu and choose "Go to  
> Folder...", you should then be able to enter /var
>
> ... Billy ...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of  
> Drifter
> Sent: Monday, June 04, 2012 2:23 PM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] debugging a Mac snafu
>
> I still haven't solved the problem of why I cannot burn the Library  
> directory to a DVD.  It complains of an (unknown) file not found.
>
> BUT, I have discovered a way to read the syslogs without too much  
> trouble
> -- and without dealing with VI just to read a system file.
>
> on a Mac terminal:
>
> syslog -d /private/var/log/asl
>
> Now if someone could tell me how to get the GUI file manager to  
> display the contents of  /var, I would be grateful.
>
> Sean
>
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