Mac Catalina Download Fix

At the time of this writing, early 2020, the HPCMP has directed staff members not to use Mac OS X Catalina. Still, we recognize there are users who have downloaded Catalina already. If you have not upgraded, you’ve done yourself a favor! Staff users testing this OS are not able to obtain a Kerberos ticket without using a YubiKey; pkint will not work with PINs.

Catalina users attempting to execute software downloaded from the DAAC website may see the following error message:

VisIt is just the example shown here; you may see a similar popup for any of the software downloaded from the DAAC website.

Rest assured the software is good. Normally, under previous Mac OSs, we would see a message saying the software is untrusted and cannot be opened. We simply opened the System Preferences->Security->General tab and clicked Open Anyway and continue. Now, however, Catalina is flagging software downloaded from this site as untrusted with special quarantine notes, not allowing the bypass. You can see these attributes for both the tgz and extracted directory with the xattr command.

User_prompt> xattr -l VisIt_3.1.2_Mac.tgz
com.apple.quarantine:  0082;5eaafae8;Safari;

Solution

Use the xattr command to clear these quarantine attributes.

User_prompt> xattr -cr /path/to/file/or/Application.app

For example, VisIt 3.1.2 produced the error dialog shown above. So we run the following command:

User_prompt> xattr -cr /Users/username/Desktop/Visit/3.1.2/VisIt.app

The -c flag clears the attribute, -r flag recursively visits all files below the base directory. After running this command, VisIt 3.1.2 can be launched.