No creation dates from stat

I was surprised to learn that creation dates are not included in stat output. I really thought stat would include something so basic. You get time of last access, time of last data modification, and time of last file status change, but creation date isn’t in there.

On the Mac, this info is stored in the resource fork. You can get it from the command line using GetFileInfo which is installed when you install Apple’s free Developer Tools.

/Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo -d path/to/file

In Applescript you can use info for:

creation date of (info for (choose file))

Notes on Leopard AD Plugin 10.5.2

The Active Directory plugin is finally usable in 10.5.2, but some environments require workarounds.

1.) Your domain must resolve to the ip address of a domain controller. This was not a requirement in previous versions, but Apple is apparently making it a requirement as they closed my bug stating that it was a configuration issue with Active Directory since creation of a domain sets up this dns info by default. If your domain does not resolve to an ip, you need to fix it, or as a workaround, edit your /etc/hosts file to point the ip of one of your domain controllers.

for example if you know you have a domain controller at 10.3.1.23 and your fully qualified domain is domain.forest.com, you’d add this line to /etc/hosts

10.3.1.23 domain.forest.com

2.) Allow Authentication from any domain in forest does not work. Uncheck this box in Directory Utility or using the corresponding flag in dsconfigad. If you don’t do this, the join may succeed, but you won’t be able to lookup or authenticate users or even use dscl on Active Directory. When you uncheck this option, just be sure to add the correct domains to your authentication search path in Search Policy of Directory Utiltity.

3.) Allow Administration by Active Directory Groups does not seem to work. In 10.4, this option seems to nest the AD group you want to allow for administration into the local admin group, so the workaround is to do the same in 10.5 manually using dseditgroup.

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a “DOMAIN\group name” -t group admin

replacing DOMAIN\group name with your domain and group that you want to give admin access.

This group nesting method gives members of your AD group admin access for both Apple’s Authorization APIs and sudo.

These workarounds got me working, logins are painfully slow, but that may be due to the hosts hack.

Update: Under 10.5.3, most of these problems are resolved. If you are still having slow logins/joins, there are possible workarounds.

Bootable Software RAID 0+1, 1+0 in Mac OS X

Software RAID striped mirrors or mirrored stripes are possible in Mac OS X. They may be 10.5 only. I haven’t tested other versions.

Simply create your striped sets using DiskUtility or diskutil, then use the command line diskutil and supply the /dev/diskx entries of the stripe sets when creating your mirror.

First run diskutil list to get the /dev/disk entries for each stripe, then create your mirror using:

diskutil createRAID mirror MirrorName JHFS+ disk1 disk2

where disk1 is the device for the first stripe set and disk2 is the device for the second stripe set.

The result is also bootable and will display correctly as a nested RAID in DiskUtility.app.

convert lines to comma separated items with tr

If you have output that is separated by new lines, but you really want it formatted into a single line with commas as separators or maybe a space as a separator, just pipe to tr.

Here is a simple example:

kserver:~ patternbuffer$ diskutil list | grep ^/dev
/dev/disk0
/dev/disk1


If we want them separated by spaces, we could do:

kserver:~ patternbuffer$ diskutil list | grep ^/dev | tr '\n' ' '
/dev/disk0 /dev/disk1


Note that there is a newline on the end of the output, so that trailing newline is also translated. So if you don’t want it there, you’ll have to chomp it off. I use sed, but use what you like.

Here is the same as above, but with commas, with sed to remove the trailing comma.

kserver:~ patternbuffer$ diskutil list | grep ^/dev | tr '\n' ',' | sed 's/.$//'
/dev/disk0,/dev/disk1