Finder service that expands flat packages

[flyboy]

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/

[thoule]

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!

[mlavine]

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]

@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.