Completely disable quarantine of downloaded files

Dec 08, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: luomat

Starting in Leopard (I believe) when you open a file downloaded from the web, OS X asks if you really mean it. While it is intended to stop maliciousness, it is only a source of aggravation for me. While there are some hints here on working around it, it turns out that you can disable it completely using a Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool NO
After that, reboot, and you should be set. (If you want to disable quarantine for files already downloaded, you can run this in 10.6 : xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads. In 10.5, you need to use this instead: find ~/Downloads -type df -exec xattr -d com.apple.quarantine {}.)

The credit for this tip should really go to Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch, who published it on his Tumblr. He, in turn, credits Ken Aspeslagh with telling him about the defaults write via Twitter.

[robg adds: This should work in 10.5 and 10.6, though I haven't tested it myself.]

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