Hidden Archive Settings in OS X
October 29th, 2007 by Ryan GovostesIf you were to run find / -iname *.prefPane on your freshly installed copy of Leopard, you might notice this show up in the results:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility.app/Contents/Resources/Archives.prefPane
Installing this preference pane allows you to change settings relating to archive creation and expansion handled by Archive Utility (formerly BOMArchiveHelper).
This joins the other known hidden prefPane introduced in 10.4, DiskImages.prefPane (hat tip to Mac OS X Hints for beating me to the punch by a year and a half).
November 8th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
This is the DiskImages preference pane and not the Archives preference pane.
November 8th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
[…] few weeks ago I wrote about a hidden preference pane that ships with Leopard, […]
November 11th, 2007 at 6:36 am
If you launch /System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility.app as an ordinary application you can just go to preferences and this will show up. No need to install it in System Preferences.
February 25th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Specifically, what do the “Use archive format” options do? I tried compressing the same folder with each of the different settings and found no difference in the resulting files.
I was hoping one option would allow compression without bringing along the extra OS X bits. I exchange a lot of files with Windows-using developers/clients, and many of them completely freak out when they unzip and see those extra files that begin with “.”.
So as much as I would prefer to use the Finder contextual menu, I use the great free utility “CleanArchiver” for zipping — it allows you to leave out that stuff. (http://www.sopht.jp/en/cleanarchiver/)