What's the standard path on MacOS X for storing application data that is to be shared by different users? I am not talking about temporary data, but data which is used by one particular program on a regular basis and belongs to no particular user. For example a game highscore table.
Thanks,
Adrian
I believe you're talking about Support files - a file that supports the application but is not required to run (your highscore table for example).
These files should be put in ~/Library/Application Support/YourApp or /Library/Application Support/YourApp for shared users.
The Library Directory Stores App-Specific Files
To get the directory, you can use the function "NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains", with the directory parameter being "NSApplicationSupportDirectory", and the domainMask parameter being "NSLocalDomainMask".
(NSApplicationSupportDirectory is the "Location of application support files", while NSLocalDomainMask means "Local to the current machine—the place to install items available to everyone on this machine.")
Some applications put files into the /Users/Shared-directory. I know it's the standard way to share files between users, but I'm not 100% sure it's thought for application data storage.
The there's the /Library*-folder which is thought for systemwide common data, similiar to the /Users/Usernames/Library.
But you certainly shouldn't write data to the Application.app-directory. Users without admin rights won't even have the right to write to these directories.
* = Or /System/Library. Need to verify.
Related
I'm creating a web application using flask that takes 3 input from the user: name, picture, grades.
I want to store these information temporary depending on the user's session.
and as a beginner I read that sessions are not for storing files, what other secure way you recommend me to use?
I would recommend to write the files to disk.
If this is really temporary, e.g. you have a two-step-sign-up-form, you could write the files to temporary files or into a temporary directory.
Please see the excellent documentation at https://docs.python.org/3/library/tempfile.html
Maybe this should not be this temporary? It sounds like a user picture is something more permanent.
Then I would recommend e.g. to create a directory for each user and store the files there.
This is done with standard Python io, e.g with the open function.
More info about reading and writing files also can be found in the official Python documentation:
https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/inputoutput.html#reading-and-writing-files
I'm a Windows developer finally getting my feet wet on Mac - I've already stumbled across translocation.
I have a Qt-based application that I am porting to Mac and have a few basic types of user data. The app is distributed currently via zip file
1) Settings/config data. I understand this belongs in a plist file
2) XML-based application data. This data is intended to be edited by both users and the application. In most cases, it will only be power users that manually edit these files.
3) Image-based (jpg/png) in-application icons. This data is used by the application and expected to be created/provided separately by users.
On Windows, both 2 and 3 are simply located in subdirectories of the .exe.
What are the options or "correct" locations for such application data?
The usual location is a custom folder in the Application Support directory. This directory exists in the local domain (/Library/Application Support/) to save data for all users and in the user domain (~/Library/Application Support/) to save data per user.
There is a convention to name the custom folder in Application Support with the bundle identifier of the application but this is not mandatory.
While the Application Support directory is created implicitly your app is responsible to create the custom folder.
(NS)FileManager provides an API to get the Application Support directory without hard-coding paths. If your app is sandboxed you must use this (NS)FileManager API anyway
I wrote a simple note taking program that's nothing more than a dictionary mapping a key to a value. IE
$ hlp -key age -value 25
$ hlp age
25
and it just stores information in a json file hardcoded to ~/.hlp.json. But I was wondering if there's likely some standard location I should be putting this file. Is there a standard location for databases like this?
A useful resource here is the hier(7) man page. (http://linux.die.net/man)
Data that is only going to be used by you belongs in $HOME, traditionally hosted under /home.
For something that is used to support the system itself, you'd be using /var. For applications that are just hosted on the system, you'd use /var/opt.
If the application is something big that could be replicated or moved to another system, you'd create a separate filesystem with a mount point outside any of those listed in hier(7). This could be a filesystem mounted from a SAN or NAS, which whould help mobility of the application.
Once you actually need to access the data from different machines, you'd have to move it to a network accessable key/value store or sql database.
When I run my Eclipse RCP application, it creates a whole lot of directories in my $HOME/.eclipse directory. What is this?
I don't want the files there, how can I hinder them from getting there? The rational for this: the application must run very clean and only leave files at one specific location (not $HOME/.eclipse).
I'd figured it was controlled by osgi.instance.area so tried to set this to different values (a directory, #none, #noDfault etc...) but can't stop the application from creating directories in $HOME/.eclipse. -data and other arguments works as expected.
On my system the only thing that is stored in .eclipse is the Equinox Secure Storage. Here is the blurb on the doc page for that:
By default, secure storage is located in your home directory. On Windows that typically resolves to "C:\Documents and Settings\.eclipse\org.eclipse.equinox.security". This location is selected to allow multiple Eclipse-based applications to share the same secure storage.
If you would like to modify the location of the default secure storage, you can use the "-eclipse.keyring " runtime option. The is a path to the file which is used to persist the secure storage data.
Here is the online reference.
For an application I'm writing, i want to programatically find out what computer on the network a file came from. How can I best accomplish this?
Do I need to monitor network transactions or is this data stored somewhere in Windows?
When a file is copied to the local system Windows does not keep any record of where it was copied. So unless the application that created it saved such information in the file then it will be lost.
With file auditing file and directory operations can be tracked, but I don't think that will include the source path with file copies (just who created it and when).
Yes, it seems like you would either need to detect the file transfer based on interception of network traffic, or if you have the ability to alter the file in some way, use public key cryptography to sign files using a machine-specific key before they are transferred.
Create a service on either the destination computer, or on the file hosting computers which will add records to an Alternate Data Stream attached to each file, much the way that Windows handles ZoneInfo for files downloaded from the internet.
You can have a background process on machine A which "tags" each file as having been tagged by machine A on such-and-such a date and time. Then when machine B downloads the file, assuming we are using NTFS filesystems, it can see the tag from A. Or, if you can't have a process at the server, you can use NTFS streams on the "client" side via packet sniffing methods as others have described. The bonus here is that future file-copies will retain the data as long as it is between NTFS systems.
Alternative: create a requirement that all file transfers must be done through a Web portal (as opposed to network drag-and-drop). Built in logging. Or other type of file retrieval proxy. Do you have control over procedures such as this?