-rwxr-xr-x@ meaning

Question

I have a file with an @ after the permissions

-rwxr-xr-x@  1 riccardotacconi  staff   215 14 Sep 14:21 Capfile

Do you know its meaning.

I am deploying a Rails application using Capistrano. That Gemfile is not copies, although it is committed in the SVN repository. Very strange.

Answer 1

Assuming you're using OS X (newer than 10.4), the @ symbol denotes the file has extended attributes associated with it. (See Stewie's answer for detail.)

To list the extended attribute, use

ls -l@

From the man page for ls:

-@  Display extended attribute keys and sizes in long (-l) output.

You should see something like the following -

(somesystem):~ user$ ls -al@ /
...
drwxr-xr-x@   6 root   wheel       204 Sep 27 12:00 private
 com.apple.FinderInfo       32

If you need to dig deeper than that, use xattr -l

Answer 2

The "@" sign -- which is not documented in the manual page for ls(1) indicates that the file has extended attributes. You can use the command 'xattr -l ' to show them

Quote from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes

Extended file attributes is a file system feature that enables users to associate computer files with metadata not interpreted by the filesystem, whereas regular attributes have a purpose strictly defined by the filesystem (such as permissions or records of creation and modification times).

Answer 3

-rwxr-xr-x for a regular file whose user class has full permissions and whose group and others classes have only the read and execute permissions.

on osx

ls command now displays a "@" character after the permissions string for each file that has extended attributes

Answer 4

You have extended attributes on that file. Run

ls -le

to get more detail.

Answer 5

Is this on OSX? See the discussion here.

Relevant part:

The "@" sign -- which is not documented in the manual page for ls(1) -- indicates that the file has extended attributes. You can use the command 'xattr -l ' to show them. It seems that a lot of Finder information, which ought to be stored in the catalog, is now in extended attributes.