Skip to Main Content
Running Mac OS X Tiger
book

Running Mac OS X Tiger

by Jason Deraleau, James Duncan Davidson
December 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
400 pages
11h 33m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Running Mac OS X Tiger

Bundles

A unique concept introduced with Mac OS X is that of the bundle. Bundles take many different forms: frameworks, applications, and software plug-ins can come packaged as bundles . A bundle is essentially a directory structure in the filesystem that is treated by the Finder as a single entity. For example, the Backup application included with a .Mac subscription will appear in the Applications folder as a single, double-clickable item. If you were to view the same application from the Terminal, you’d see that it is actually a directory, as shown in Example 3-4.

Example 3-4. Viewing the contents of an application bundle

$ ls -la /Applications/Backup.app/
total 0
drwxrwxr-x    3 root  admin   102 May 17 09:09 .
drwxrwxr-x   57 root  admin  1938 Aug 31 08:52 ..
drwxrwxr-x    8 root  admin   272 Apr 23  2004 Contents

While the Finder hides this fact, you can expose it by right-clicking (or Control-clicking) the application and choosing Show Package Contents. This will show you the bundle’s contents, as shown in Figure 3-6.

Not all bundles are applications. Some software programs use bundles as their file formats (for example, the Mac OS X Installer’s .pkg files) as well as the development frameworks that are included with the OS. One of the nicest things about bundles is that they work behind the scenes, enabling a complete application to be presented as a single icon in the Finder. This makes removing, moving, and installing a piece of software a simple drag and drop operation.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Apple Training Series Mac OS X Directory Services v10.5

Apple Training Series Mac OS X Directory Services v10.5

Arek Dreyer

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009135Catalog PageErrata