/private folder on OSX lost it's '@' attribute

Question

Somehow my /private folder lost it's '@' attribute. Now, the folder shows up in my finder:

0 drwxr-xr-x    6 root  wheel       204 Mar  1 21:25 private

This is what it should be:

0 drwxr-xr-x@   6 root  wheel       204 Mar  1 21:25 private

How do I set it back?

Answer 1

It's an indicator of extended attributes. On my machine, it's only com.apple.FinderInfo, with the value:

$ xattr -p com.apple.FinderInfo private
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

The first eight bytes are type and creator codes, the next four are Finder flags (page 13).

On my machine, only kIsInvisible is set, so it's possible that when you navigate to your disk root folder, private is visible.

Enter the following in Terminal to restore its hidden state and the associated extended attribute:

sudo chflags hidden /private