Compressed archives are a fact of life in OS X. If you spend anywhere near the amount of time on the web that I do—in which case, you really should get outside. Yes, the big room with the blue ceiling—you’ve probably become accustomed to downloading ZIP files, uncompressing, mounting disk images, installing applications, doing a little dance, making a little lov—wait, where were we?
Thanks to our favorite master of obscure OS X features, Rob “Hint Me” Griffiths, we now know that Leopard allows you to tweak some of the behaviors of OS when it comes to the laborious prospects of archiving and unarchiving. But first, you’ll need to uncover the secret grail-like application, lost in the sands of time, that makes it all possible. We must dig deep, into the far reaches of the /System/Library/Core Services directory. Look closely and you’ll find Archive Utility.app, the key to it all.
The app allows you to compress and expand archives, but the secrets reside in its Preferences window, where you can tell it how it should treat archives after you decompress them (I chose the good old “move to trash” route); what folder archives should be expanded into; what format to use when you’re creating archives, and more. Read Rob’s full post above and you can also find out how to create an Archive preference pane so you can keep the options at your fingertips without having to leave the Archive Utility in your Dock at all times.
The correct path is "/System/Library/CoreServices" (no space).
Great tip otherwise!
- Mike