Trailing @ sign after permissions

[Lars79]

Hello,

 

I have Leopard running and just noticed a trailing @ sign after the permissions of some files when listed with "ls -l" in the terminal:

 

-rw-r--r--@ 1 <user> staff 4 Dec 19 11:42 test.txt

 

I first thought the @ sign might indicate a symbolic link, but "ls -F" shows

 

test.txt

 

instead of

 

test.txt@

 

It would be great if anyone knows what the @ sign after the permissions means. I have never seen that on any of my Linux boxes before. Thanks.

 

Lars

[exscape]

From the ls man page:

If the file or directory has extended attributes, the permissions field printed by the -l option is followed by a '@' character.

 

I wondered the very same thing a while ago, took me a while to find out.

[Lars79]

Thanks for your fast reply. I checked the man page before posting, but I must have overread that section.

 

For everyone else that's interested: "ls -l@" shows the extended attributes. In my case it was "com.apple.TextEncoding" which seems to be automatically set for all files edited by TextEdit. This might be the case due to the fact that the character encoding for saving files is set to "Automatic" by default.

 

Thanks again .