Silent Failures When Accessing Files & Folders

Tips & Tutorials
1

I was struggling with an issue where KBM access to files/folders within my home directory would not work. Specifically, I was using a "for each item" action to iterate the contents of a folder. As a test, I was simply displaying the path of each the file in a folder to a window and there were NO WINDOWS displayed when the macro was executed. However, a 'sibling' folder to the one I was interested in ran as expected, as did the macro when the folder was set to the parent folder of the one I was interested in.

Now that I determined the issue, I thought it may be worthwhile to mention it here in case others bump up against the same issue.

It took a bit of sleuthing, but I finally noticed that when I looked at the directory listing of folders that worked and those that did not - the ones that were silently failing had an '@' following the file attributes section. The '@' indicates that there are extended attributes for this file/folder. When I queried the extended attributes, I observed that the folders which were silently failing all had the same extended attribute: com.apple.macl It seems that this attribute is used to protect some folders from applications that do not have Full Disk Access granted.

Once I granted Keyboard Maestro full disk access, the actions would run as expected.

In my particular case, I was attempting to access ~/Library/HomeKit (which has the 'com.apple.macl' extended attribute applied).

2

If I understand your post correctly, this is the solution.
If not, please reply with the solution.

3

I am not sure if that is a "solution" or a workaround.

Perhaps the question at hand is - could KM alert the user to the problem rather than failing silently?

4

@rkaplan - Questioning the terminology is a fair point. In the end, I opted for 'solution' since KM is not the only app to be impacted by this, ALL apps are affected. Any app that is not granted full disk access will have a similar issue. So this is not really a workaround, as the (perceived) problem is actually an operating system 'feature'. For example, when I revoke Full Disk Access from terminal and then do a simple directory listing of a folder with this extended attribute, the command also fails.

image
image856×286 122 KB

Of course, if there is any way for KBM to warn of this at design or runtime, that would also be of immense help. When I searched around the forums, there was nothing documenting this attribute nor the observed behaviors, so I wanted to have at least something.

1 Like
5

@JMichaelTX - Granting 'Full Disk Access' to 'Keyboard Maestro.app' was the solution to access files/folders with the 'com.apple.macl' extended attribute.

However, as @rkaplan, suggested - perhaps there is something that KBM can detect (either at design time or runtime) to alert the user to this issue