Icon? file on OS X desktop
Solution 1
What is it?
It's name is actually Icon\r
, with \r
being the carriage return 0x0D
. If letting the shell autocomplete the path in Terminal, it yields Icon^M
, ^M
being \r
.
Icon^M
is a file existing in all directories that have a custom icon in Finder. If you change a directory's icon e.g. in its Get Info dialog by pasting an image into the icon in the upper left corner, the Icon^M
file is created.
Changing a volume's icon creates a hidden .VolumeIcon.icns
file instead.
Why is it invisible?
It's invisible in Finder, because its hidden
attribute is set.
$ ls -lO Icon^M
-rw-r--r--@ 1 danielbeck staff hidden 0 24 Apr 23:29 Icon?
Change with chflags nohidden Icon^M
.
Where is its data?
While the file's data fork (i.e. content) is empty (i.e. a file size of 0 bytes in Terminal), the actual icon data is stored in the file's resource fork.
$ ls -l@ Icon^M
com.apple.ResourceFork 350895
You can copy the resource fork to a file (to view e.g. in a hex editor) like this:
$ cp Icon^M/..namedfork/rsrc Icondata
How can I view it?
The easiest way to get the image is to copy the icon from the Get Info dialog of the folder it's contained in into the clipboard, and then create a new image from clipboard in Preview (Cmd-N
). It's an icns
image then by default.
Its format is icns, encoded as an icon resource with derez. If you open it in a hex editor and remove the first 260 bytes (so the file begins with the icns
magic byte-string), you can open it in Preview.app. Alternatively you can open it with XnView
Solution 2
An Icon?
file inside a directory contains a custom icon image for that directory. The image itself is stored inside an extended file attribute, specifically, com.apple.ResourceFork
, which is why the Icon?
file appears to have no length.
You can retrieve that data with $ xattr -p com.apple.ResourceFork Icon?
or view all extended attributes with $ xattr -l Icon?
On Snow Leopard, at least, they appear to have been phased out for system icons (In the case of ~/Desktop/, that icon would be visible when viewing your home directory in icon view.) but for the two custom directory icons I have on my system, it still exists.
Solution 3
What is it?
It is the file that stores the Image for your Folder Icon, I was only able to get this to be created if I manually loaded an image to the folder. I don't have these on my system by default.
How To Find the Icon^M files
NOTE:
This is not the same as .icns
file extension.
Should you be paranoid about if finding a false positive then use:ctrl+v ctrl+m instead of ?
#!/bin/bash
# =============================================================================
# MAC OSX HIGH SIERRA 10.13.4 (17E199)
# Terminal: Version: 2.8.2 64-Bit (Intel): Yes
# Terminal Location: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
# =============================================================================
echo 'Searching Documents for Icon files...'
find ~/Documents -type f -name 'Icon?' -print;
How To Create the Icon^M file
- Open Finder
- Right Click On a Folder
- Press & Hold Option on your keyboard
- Select Show Inspector
- Drag an image to the top left folder icon.
- Run
ls -lah
on that directory- You should see:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 username staff 0B May 13 22:23 Icon?
- You should see:
How Remove the Icon^M file
Should you need to remove it for any reason... say accidentally on purpose testing it.
#!/bin/bash
# =============================================================================
# MAC OSX HIGH SIERRA 10.13.4 (17E199)
# Terminal: Version: 2.8.2 64-Bit (Intel): Yes
# Terminal Location: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
# =============================================================================
echo 'Removing Icon files from Documents...'
find ~/Documents -type f -name 'Icon?' -print -delete;
Reference from my post on another question:
How can I delete empty folders in Mac OS X?
Solution 4
The Icon^M file is a hidden macOS system file that manages a custom image for the containing folder. However, users may find these files created for other reasons.
For example, the macOS version of Google Drive would create an Icon file in every folder in order to track sync status.
You may safely delete these files. While in Terminal, from the parent directory, run the following command: (be sure to insert the ^M with the ctrl-v, ctrl-m keystrokes):
find . -type f -name 'Icon^M' -exec rm -f {} \;
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Chris
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
-
Chris almost 2 years
When I
ls
my Desktop from terminal (by usingls ~/Desktop
), I see a file namedIcon?
. As far as I can tell, it's empty (nano Icon?
shows nothing). It doesn't show up on my actual Desktop, andopen Icon?
shows the Finder alertThis item is used by Mac OS X and can't be opened
Here is the output from
mdls Icon?
:kMDItemContentType = "" kMDItemFSContentChangeDate = 2009-09-23 13:32:52 -0600 kMDItemFSCreationDate = 2009-09-20 07:27:46 -0600 kMDItemFSCreatorCode = "MACS" kMDItemFSFinderFlags = 16384 kMDItemFSHasCustomIcon = 0 kMDItemFSInvisible = 1 kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden = 0 kMDItemFSIsStationery = 0 kMDItemFSLabel = 0 kMDItemFSName = "Icon " kMDItemFSNodeCount = 0 kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID = 20 kMDItemFSOwnerUserID = 501 kMDItemFSSize = 0 kMDItemFSTypeCode = "icon"
Does anyone have an idea as to what this is?
-
JeremyKun over 9 yearsThe real question is: is there a way to stop the operating system from creating these damn files in every directory? It really annoys me that they show up in Dropbox.
-
Motti Shneor over 5 yearsThese files are NOT created automatically "in every directory" unless you have some nasty software that causes their creation. Also - they may annoy you, but they have their functionality too. This the implementation of "Custom user-icon" in MacOS. If user elects to paste any image of his liking to serve as the icon of some file or directory - it will end up as a hidden iCon? file. Deleting them simply removes the custom icon.
-
-
HikeMike about 13 yearsThe "system icons" have never created an
Icon^M
file as far as I know. Rename these special folders with custom icons (easiest to do with~/Applications
, as it doesn't exist by default anyway) and their icon will change with it. -
NReilingh about 13 years@Daniel Yup; I suppose OP has a customized icon for his Desktop folder, then.
-
Lukasa about 13 yearsApple actually do this hiding of their data in a resource fork quite frequently. I can never decide if it's neat or misleading.
-
JdeBP about 13 yearsIt's consistent. Icons after all are resource fork contents.
-
HikeMike about 13 years@JdeBP I mention the inconsistency with volume icons in my post. I don't want to see what inconsistency would look like then ;)
-
JdeBP about 13 yearsYou miss the wood for a single tree, grasshopper. Look beyond a volume icon file to the great forest of cases where, traditionally in MacOS at least, icons are to be found in resource forks. If you're trying to be all modern and hip and we-don't-need-no-steenking-resource-forks-we're-Unix-now, you should really correct your answer to use the modern and hip
/..namedfork/rsrc
suffix instead of the one that generates a warning message. (-: -
HikeMike about 13 years@JdeBP I don't care one way or another about the resource fork icons, but it's still inconsistent with
.VolumeIcon.icns
. Thank you for the..namedfork
hint, but I don't get a warning fromFile/rsrc
. I read that I should, but where does it appear? -
JdeBP about 13 years
-
HikeMike about 13 years@JdeBP Your amazing psychic powers are broken. I checked the system log even before commenting yesterday. It's actually the kernel log.
-
JdeBP about 13 yearsThey are one and the same with many people's actual
syslog.conf
s on MacOS. Thekern.debug
facility messages generated byprintf
are directed tosystem.log
. Don't believe the example configuration file in Apple's documentation. -
HikeMike about 13 years@JdeBP If you're referencing that post's first comment, the line following that one, at least in my
/etc/syslogd.conf
iskern.* /var/log/kernel.log
. Since you link toxnu
sources, it's reasonable to assume that theseprintf
s end up inkernel.log
viakern.*, no? I didn't believe some
man` page, it's where the messages are actually logged on my system... -
JdeBP about 13 yearsAll these
printf
messages without explicit prival prefixes come out of the kernel askern.debug
as far assyslogd
is concerned, grasshopper. That you yourself may not sendkern.debug
tosystem.log
does not change the truth of the many people who do. The earnest seeker for truth that can use a WWW search engine to look for thesyslog.conf
s of others will find true enlightenment. (-: -
Jonny about 10 yearsI had to delete the custom icon of a folder to get that folder into SVN...
-
Lake over 9 years@Lukasa - It's consistent (as JdeBP noted) but it's also historical. The collision of NeXT and Classic MacOS meant many hard decisions about which conventions to keep, which to discard, and when to attempt both. Resource Forks on OS X were more painful until they were moved to Extended Attributes (John Siracusa's OS X 10.4 Tiger Review's section on their introduction).
-
ma11hew28 almost 8 yearsShould I add it to my
.gitignore
file? -
gbarry over 5 years+1, since "How to Remove" missing from the accepted answer. And no, they're not useful when accessed from Windows, via minGW's bash.
-
jan deeg about 4 years@DanielBeck "copy the icon from the Get Info dialog of the folder it's contained in into the clipboard" How do you do that?
-
David J. over 3 yearsFor Zsh at least, I use `Icon$'\r' for the correct filename.
-
David J. over 3 yearsFor Zsh at least, I use `Icon$'\r' for the correct filename.
-
David J. over 3 yearsUsing
?
leads to unnecessary positives. Be more precise by using ANSI-C Quoting. For example:find . -type f -name $'Icon\r' -print;
-
David J. over 3 yearsThe current command, which uses
-name 'Icon?'
, may give false positives. Combined with the-delete
action, it is not safe. Having-type f
is a step in the right direction but not sufficient. Just because the likelihood of false positives may 'seem' small does not make the command safe. A better alternative exists: specify the filename precisely with ANSI-C Quoting, as I mention above:-name $'Icon\r'
-
RexYuan over 3 yearsWhy would they choose to put a trailing return
\r
in the filename?