Before Zohran Mamdani became a state legislator, he helped South Asian New Yorkers who were in danger of losing their homes because of tax liens and job losses.

© Adam Gray for The New York Times

The former governor, a distant second in most polls of the New York City mayor’s race, is working harder to attract voters and remind them who he is.

© Shuran Huang for The New York Times

Helen DeWitt’s bewildering co-written novel, “Your Name Here,” took almost 20 years to publish, a process that nearly drove her to despair.

© Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times

The administration often criticizes journalists, but the treatment of Shirish Dáte, a reporter for HuffPost, stands out.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times

After he resigned as governor, Mr. Cuomo looked to restore his name while taking on a new lucrative career as a podcast host. Things did not go according to plan.

© James Estrin/The New York Times

Last week I drew attention to problems interpreting the timestamps of files in macOS, generating lively discussion with Chris and Richard. Although the gist of that article stands, it was clear that there remained several issues, and this sequel tries to address those better, with the aid of a new app, Dropera 2. The TL;DR for this article is that timestamps are even more complicated than I previously described.

The first task was to develop a tool for reading and recording these timestamps reproducibly. Although the four key timestamps are exposed in Precize, opening a file in that app is likely to change at least one of them. For a substitute I turned to an earlier SwiftUI demo, Dropera, with its drag-and-drop support to handle file URLs without opening, reading or otherwise changing the file.

Timestamps

This new version of Dropera had then to read the right timestamps and convert them into accessible dates and times. For some timestamps, we’re spoiled for choice: time of creation of a file, shown in the Finder as Date Created, is saved in an APFS file’s attributes as create_time, exposed in the stat command as st_birthtime, and accessible within an app’s code as the NSFileCreationDate file attribute or creationDate URL resource. To establish which timestamp is which, I have compiled a table giving the sources I have been able to discover.

For Dropera, following careful comparison with the values delivered in stat, I selected:

• Creation from NSFileCreationDate
• Modification from NSFileModificationDate
• Attribute modification from attributeModificationDate
• Access from contentAccessDate.

The last two aren’t available in the Finder or elsewhere in the GUI, while the Finder does provide Date Last Opened, Date Added and Content Created:

• Date Last Opened isn’t related to Access Time, but is recorded in the com.apple.useddate extended attribute. Unfortunately, adding and manipulating that may change the Attribute Modification timestamp, so has to be avoided. As Apple doesn’t appear to document the xattr or its interpretation, I have avoided looking at it any further here.
• Date Added is the timestamp when a file was added to its current directory. As that isn’t strictly speaking a file attribute, I will ignore it here.
• Embedded records of Content Created require file data to be read, so accessing them is likely to update at least one of the key timestamps.

Each of those three is available from the metadata indexed by Spotlight, but that’s an indirect and unreliable way to access them.

Using Dropera

To use Dropera to read the four key timestamps just drop the file onto its window, and the app will then display the filename, its path, and the four timestamps in the order of Creation, Modification, Attribute modification and Access times.

Adjust the window width to make these most convenient to read. The layout shown above is compact and automatically splits each timestamp into date and time components. In other uses, you might prefer to widen the window so each entry takes a single line.

To refresh the values shown for the current files, click on the Refresh tool. Although the window continues to display just the single set of entries, the previous timestamps are saved in memory, and the whole history since the last drag-and-drop onto that window can be exported to a text file using the Save as text tool. You can also select the line of results, copy and paste that into another app if you prefer.

Drop multiple files onto Dropera’s window and all their timestamps will be shown. You can then select continuously (Shift-click) or discontinuously (Command-click) to copy those values, and Refresh them.

Demonstration

Open TextEdit, create a new file and set its type to plain text. Add a few words and save it somewhere convenient. Then open Dropera, and drop that file onto its window to inspect its timestamps. They’re likely to show Creation and Modification times the same, Attribute modification slightly later, and Access another second or so afterwards.

Next make a small change to that document and save it. Click Dropera’s Refresh tool and only the Creation time remains unchanged. Close that document in TextEdit, and Refresh the times again to confirm that none have changed. Now select the file in the Finder so its QuickLook thumbnail is previewed. When you Refresh its times, you should see its Access time has been updated. Now double-click the file to open it in TextEdit, and check times again while the file is still open. Attribute modification and Access times are altered, but remain the same after you have closed the document. Export those records as a text file, and you should see:

• Creation time remains unchanged throughout.
• Modification time changes once, when the second version was saved.
• Attribute modification time changes twice, when the modified file was saved, and when the file was reopened.
• Access time changes three times, the additional occasion being when you viewed the document’s thumbnail in the Finder.

Dropera 2, which requires macOS 14.6 or later, is available from here: dropera20

Enjoy!

In a crowded field of would-be successors, Brilyn Hollyhand hopes to capture the minds of young conservatives across America.

© Audra Melton for The New York Times

American Ballet Theater’s first Black female principal dancer has given her farewell performance. But she’s not done with this art form yet.

© Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

The star never imagined he’d be performing as the Boss in front of the Boss. But the head-spinning nature of the role has paid off.

It’s actually great to be in my 80s.

A parade of scandals tarnished the prince’s reputation, long before he gave up using his title as Duke of York on Friday.

The Supreme Court justice isn’t making decisions based on public opinion.

For many years, I believed what the log command told me, that log entries could contain any of the 26 or more fields available, although they didn’t. It was only as I was developing utilities like LogUI that I discovered that log entries come in (at least) four types, each with its own format and set of fields. This article is a guide to those, and how they are displayed in LogUI.

Entry fields

Those available in the OSLog API are fewer in number than appear in log command output, and include some of limited interest. Those not exposed in LogUI include:

• store category, which is invariably disk storage here.
• format string, that used to format the contents of messages. This was introduced following serious security leaks in High Sierra.
• components, linking in with the format string.

LogUI displays each entry using the same order of fields and colour-coding. Although they can’t all be seen together in any single log entry, the overall sequence is:

Standard levels are given as text, and chosen from one of the following: fault, error, notice, info, debug, undefined. These are only used with Regular log entries, not other types. LogUI always includes debug level entries when they’re available.

The four types of entry are:

1. Regular
2. Activity
3. Boundary
4. Signpost.

Regular entries

These are normally by far the most common, and are seen throughout the processes and subsystems writing log entries. They normally contain up to the following fields:
datestamp, [1], activity ID, category, level, sender, process, process ID, subsystem, thread ID, message

These examples include:
datestamp, 1, activity ID, category, level, sender, process, process ID, subsystem, thread ID, message
which is fairly normal.

Activities

These mark specific activities, and vary according to the process and subsystem. Some are valuable waypoints, and all are recognisably shorter than most regular entries, containing only the following fields:
datestamp, [2], activity ID, parent activity ID, sender, process, process ID, thread ID, message

These are examples of one of the most valuable activities reported, indicating a mouse-click or tap. They’re also complete, as they consist of:
datestamp, 2, activity ID, parent activity ID, sender, process, process ID, thread ID, message

Boundaries

These are rare but instantly recognisable because of their brevity. They consist of just three fields:
datestamp,[3], message

Two of the most important are the announcement of the start of kernel boot:

and adjustment of the internal clock:

These are also easy to search for, as their message contains the distinctive === string.

Signposts

By default, LogUI extracts omit Signposts, but if you tick the Show Signposts box before loading log entries, they will also be displayed. In parts, they can outnumber regular entries, and are unlikely to provide you with meaningful information unless you know internal details of their process. Each Signpost adds three type-specific fields, shown after the process ID:
datestamp, [4], activity ID, category, sender, process, process ID, signpost ID, signpost name, signpost type, subsystem, thread ID

These examples come from the most prolific user of Signposts, SkyLight for WindowServer, and contain
datestamp, 4, activity ID, category, sender, process, process ID, signpost ID, signpost name, signpost type, subsystem, thread ID
Note there’s no message field, as their meaning is determined by the signpost fields.

Datestamps and times

The OSLog API doesn’t currently give access to Mach times, only to opaque Date variables. From those, LogUI’s datestamps give:
year–month–day hour:minute:second.microsecond+timezone

All times and time zones given are those current when LogUI obtains that extract, not when that entry was written. This can become extremely confusing when clocks change to and from {summer time, daylight time, daylight saving time, daylight savings time, DST}, and when passing through time zones, and great care is required when reading logs containing such corrections. LogUI tries to make this easier, but care is still required.

If you have used the log command, you may be aware that can return Mach times as ticks, offering precision down to the nanosecond. This currently isn’t possible when using the OSLog API, but given the relatively slow clock of Apple silicon Macs, it’s no longer as useful as it used to be with Intel’s nanosecond Mach ticks.

Censorship

By default, all data in message fields is censored to protect the privacy of the user. This replaces chunks of text with the dreaded <private>, and can render many entries devoid of any useful information. In recent versions of macOS log privacy can be removed by installing a profile. However, that doesn’t apply retrospectively, only to log entries collected after the profile has been installed.

Removing privacy also increases the size in storage of log entries, and may reveal sensitive information. As soon as you have completed acquisition of the logs you need with privacy removed, you should therefore remove the profile, to allow normal censorship to resume.

A suitably signed profile is here: enablelogprivatedata

To install the profile, unzip the archive into a convenient folder and double-click it. You’ll be informed by a notification that you need to review the profile to install it. Open System Settings and select Device Management in its View menu, or search for it. Follow the instructions given there to install and activate it.

Sadly, this doesn’t cover all censorship. Some systems require additional configuration changes, for example CFNetwork diagnostic logging. Jeff Johnson explained how to enable that, but Apple has since blocked that, and I don’t know of a practical alternative. In some cases, additional detail can be obtained by adjusting log settings.

Summary

A short practical summary of LogUI’s log entries is provided in its Help book.