Recently, I was asked to find a way to delete the 'Where From' link in the Get Info box of the Finder, because the info key was too incriminating. I didn't want to download any software, so I set about looking in the file's metadata. After running mdls and xattr on the file, I finally hit upon a way to delete the key.
If you run xattr on your downloaded file, like this:
xattr /Path/To/File
You'll get a key named com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms. To delete this key in the Terminal, run:
xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms /Path/To/File
I knew I would have to do this often, so instead of running a shell script every time I wanted to strip the Where From, I wrote an AppleScript:
on deleteWhereFrom(fileToClean) try set posixPath to quoted form of POSIX path of fileToClean do shell script "xattr -d com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms " & posixPath end try end deleteWhereFrom on open imgs repeat with i in imgs deleteWhereFrom(i) end repeat end open on run set imgs to choose file with multiple selections allowed repeat with i in imgs deleteWhereFrom(i) end repeat end run
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20101206161739274