The Files Pane

Force Delete

Badly written applications and installers which don't handle permissions correctly may leave files or folders on your system that cannot be moved into the Trash easily. In other cases, applications are installed with a large number of locked files which also cannot be removed quickly. If you want to enforce removal of a large number of locked files, or if you want to remove a file in a folder with inappropriate permission settings, you can do so with the Force Delete feature:

1. Either enter the name of the object, or press the button [...] to choose an object from a list, or drag and drop an object from the Finder to the field File or folder to delete.
2. By default, TinkerTool System only deletes a single object, which means a single file or an empty folder. You can disable this security feature by checking the option Allow deletion of bundle or folder containing files.
3. Press the Delete button.

To make sure Mac OS X is not being destroyed by this feature, TinkerTool System will not accept operating system files for deletion. However, you should not rely on this security feature alone. When deleting files, make always sure no user and no application needs them any longer.

Force Empty Trash

Because files and folders in the Trash can have the same problems noted under Force Delete above, you may not be able to empty the trash completely. You can enforce removal of all Trash files on a selected volume:

1. Select a volume with the pop-up menu or set a checkmark at the option Select all volumes.
2. Press the button Empty Trash to enforce complete deletion of the Trash on the selected volume, or on all volumes, respectively.

For security reasons TinkerTool does not allow to select network volumes.
If you move items to the Trash immediately after having used the Empty Trash feature of TinkerTool System, the Finder may no longer use the Trash but deletes the files in place. To avoid this problem, relaunch the Finder or logout/login after using the Empty Trash function.

Delete Resource Forks

The classic Mac OS operating system supported a feature that allowed the storage of files with multiple streams of data: Not only the "normal" contents of the file could be saved to a disk volume, the file could contain secondary data streams as well, which stored supplementary information. Those separate components were called "forks". Mac OS handled them in a completely opaque way. A file was always represented as being one single object, no matter how many forks it contained.

Each fork of a file has a certain name. The standard fork of a file, which contains the actual contents, is called the "data fork". Legacy Mac OS applications often used a second fork with the name "rsrc", the so-called "resource fork". It was used to store additional resources, e.g. customized icons, layout information for text documents, etc.

Apple still fully supports forks in Mac OS X, although their use is deprecated. TinkerTool System allows you to destroy resource forks from legacy documents if you like to do so.

Warning: Destroying the resource fork of a file only makes sense if you know exactly that the information in the fork is no longer needed by any of your applications. Resource forks can contain important data. If you delete them although they are still needed, the affected file - a document or application - will become unusable!

An example for a situation where it is safe to destroy a resource fork, is a JPEG image file. The JFIF industry standard, which defines how a JPEG-compressed picture is to be saved into an image file, does not specify that an image file must contain multiple forks. This means if you have a JPEG file which contains an additional resource fork, the information stored in the resource fork is not really necessary to decode and load the JPEG image. A legacy Mac OS application might have used the resource fork to store additional data, e.g. a customized icon containing a thumbnail preview image. These preview icons are no longer needed in Mac OS X, because Mac OS X is fast enough to compute preview images (for open panels, or preview functions in the Finder) on the fly, directly from the original image file itself. In this case you might want to destroy the resource fork because it is unnecessary and only consumes storage space.

To destroy the resource fork of one file (or of all files in a folder and all its subfolders), do the following after selecting the tab item Delete Fork:

1. Either enter the name of the object, or press the button [...] to choose an object from a list, or drag and drop an object from the Finder to the field File or top folder from which to remove resource forks.
2. Press the Delete button.

If the preference to create a report before performing any delete operation is set, TinkerTool System will display a table of all resource forks, together with information how much storage space they are consuming. You cannot destroy resource forks from files where you don't have write permission.

Forks are only stored on HFS volumes or via AppleShare (AFP) network connections. On all other types of volumes, Mac OS X emulates forks by converting them automatically to hidden "dot underscore" files. If you want to remove that kind of files, please see the chapter The Clean Up pane, paragraph Remove emulated forks for more information.

Analyze File Contents

You may sometimes receive files of unknown origin or with unknown document types. There are other cases where invalid type markers or file name extensions may have been applied to a file, for example a file displayed by the Finder as a PNG image file which actually contains a JPEG image. To find out what is actually contained in a file, you can let Mac OS X look into the file and have it analyze what its contents may be.

1. Either enter the name of the file, or press the button [...] to choose a file from a list, or drag and drop a file from the Finder to the field Specify file to analyze.
2. The result of the analysis will be displayed in the field Results.

The analysis is done by the underlying operating system, not by TinkerTool System. For this reason the results may slightly vary in different operating system versions. The report is always displayed in English, no matter what preferred language you have set in your personal preferences.

You can only select one file at a time. It is not possible to analyze applications or "application-like" components, like widgets or plug-ins. Applications are actually folders which contain a large number of different files. To select one of the files inside an application, select it in the Finder and use the Finder's feature Show package contents to open the application as a folder. Then drag one of the contained files into the field of TinkerTool System.

Modify HFS and Finder Attributes

Files and folders which have been created or stored by a Macintosh system can have some special attributes attached to them:

• A file can be associated with a type code: The type code is designed to indicate what kind of document the file should represent. By help of the type code, the system can quickly determine what is expected to be stored in a given file, without needing any special markers in the file name and without having to analyze the contents of a file.
• A file can also be associated with a creator code: The creator code is designed to indicate which application should open this file. By help of the creator code, the system can quickly determine the application it should select to open a given document.
• Files or folders can be associated with a visibility marker: If an object is marked as being invisible, the Finder and all Open File panels will no longer display the object. You can only select the file by specifying its full BSD path name, or by using applications which do not respect the visibility attribute.

1. Either enter the name of the object, or press the button [...] to choose an object from a list, or drag and drop an object from the Finder to the field Single file or folder.
2. Modify the attributes entering new values into the code fields, or pressing one of the visibility buttons.
3. Press the button Save to set the new attributes, or press the button Revert to discard your changes and reread the current attributes from the selected object.

Type codes and creator codes must be specified either by four characters of the ASCII character set, or by four arbitrary bytes which have to be entered using eight hexadecimal digits (the digits 0 to 9 and the letters a, b, c, d, e, f, or A, B, C, D, E, F). If you are entering hexadecimal digits, you must begin your input with the Euro currency symbol (€). This is necessary to let the program know whether you are specifying the digits to represent bytes or to represent the code itself. Note that codes specified by ASCII are always case-sensitive. Examples for valid codes are:

• PREF
• ilge
• 8BPS
• €A4B7C1D1

To remove a type or creator code from a file, fully delete the entry in the respective type field and press Save.

TinkerTool System cannot assist you in selecting type or creator codes for known document types or known applications, respectively. You'll have to know the correct codes in advance.

Warning: Keep in mind that you can no longer use drag-and-drop or file dialogs for objects which are invisible. You'll have to enter the object's full BSD path to access it by an application. This also includes TinkerTool System. However, you could use our sister application TinkerTool to modify your Finder preferences so that it will display visible and invisible files simultaneously.

The mentioned attributes represent outdated technology which has initially been designed for the classic Mac OS, but is still supported by Mac OS X. Only HFS file systems and AppleShare (AFP) file servers can store the attributes natively. Mac OS X will automatically emulate them on other file systems. If emulation is necessary, this will slow down access to files because each object must be stored in two parts: the actual file and a hidden second file which stores the emulated attributes.
Especially creator codes have an additional disadvantage: They enforce a fixed binding between a document and an application. If a user receives a file and then tries to open it but doesn't have the bound application, s/he will receive the potentially misleading error message that only the bound application can open the file. This might be wrong because in today's software world documents can typically be opened by many different applications of competing vendors.

Classic Desktop

If Mac OS X detected a Classic Mac OS version during installation, an alias is automatically created that allows you to access the Classic Desktop while working with Mac OS X. When this alias has been removed unintentionally, you can recreate it with TinkerTool System:

1. Select the volume where the version of Classic Mac OS is located whose Desktop you want to access.
2. Press the button Recreate Alias.

This feature cannot be used in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (or later) because Classic is no longer available on such systems.

Create Symbolic Links

Although symbolic links are a core feature of Mac OS X, current versions of the Finder are unable to create them. A symbolic link is a "pointer" to a file or a folder which can be placed at a specific location while it is pointing to the "original" object at another location. You basically create a second representation of the object without having to create a copy.

Symbolic links are very similar to Mac OS aliases which can be created by the Finder. However, there are two important differences between links and aliases:

• If the original file is moved or renamed and a file with the same name is put at the former place, an alias will still point to the previous version of the file, while a symbolic link will point to the new file at the same place. This behavior is useful e.g. when you need a reference to an object which is replaced in regular intervals by new versions, while the previous versions are archived.
• Links are automatically supported by all applications while the programs don't even need to know that links exist. Aliases however, are only supported by applications which are aware of the alias technology of the classic Mac OS.

To create a symbolic link, do the following:

1. Specify the original object in the upper field. Either enter the path of the object, or press the button […] to choose an object from a list, or drag and drop an object from the Finder into the field.
2. Enter the name of the link to be created into the lower field. It is recommended to use the Select button to display a standard save panel.
3. Press the button Create to create the link.

Lock or unlock Files

Mac OS X supports the feature to put a lock on a file which means the file cannot be changed or deleted unless the lock is removed. With TinkerTool System you can set or remove locks for a large number of files even if the Finder is unable to do this.

1. Specify the file or the topmost folder where you want to change locks in the upper field. Either enter the path of the object, or press the button […] to choose an object from a list, or drag and drop an object from the Finder into the field.
2. Use the buttons at Operation to select if you want to lock or unlock files.
3. Press the button Start to execute the selected operation.

Some non-Macintosh file systems do not support locks. In this case the operations won't have an effect.

Unix users should not confuse this feature with operations that mark objects or file regions for exclusive access. Setting a lock in Macintosh terminology is equivalent to setting the "no user change" flag in BSD.

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