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Question

Finder service that expands flat packages

  • December 18, 2015
  • 3 replies
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flyboy
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I do a lot of package building and tear-down, and realized this morning that I was tired of manually expanding flat packages and then uncompressing their payloads to figure out what's going on. To that end I created a Finder service in Automator to do all that for me. It takes the selected finder items and then runs them through a shell script that leverages pkguti, gunzip, & cpio to unpack things.

You can find the action on my GitHub. To install, copy the .workflow directory to ~/Library/Services/

3 replies

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  • Contributor
  • December 18, 2015

Sweet! I didn't know Automator could work to pull up shell scripts like that. I see some uses for that functionality. Thanks for the lesson and the action!


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  • Contributor
  • December 18, 2015

There is also a program called Suspicious Package (http://www.mothersruin.com/software/SuspiciousPackage/) that seems to do what you desire. It uses Quick View to show you what a package is installing as well as what scripts it will run. Very useful.


flyboy
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  • Author
  • Valued Contributor
  • December 21, 2015

@mlavine, I do have Suspicious Package and use it for quick inspections. This just works better for my workflow. I like to tear into the package and then serve it up with some fava beans and a nice chianti.