Go DS_Store Parser

A high-performance, command-line tool written in Go to parse and display the contents of macOS .DS_Store files in human-readable or JSONL format.

This project is a Go port of the original Python script by Thomas Zhu, designed for speed and portability. Link here

The most important benefit is that this tool can be run in the target directly without the need of having installed any non-native tool (such as Python).

It's important to highlight that I developed this tool mainly using vibe-coding.

Features

• Fast Parsing: Natively compiled Go provides a significant speed advantage over scripted solutions.
• Portable: Generates a single, dependency-free binary that can be run on any modern macOS system.
• Multiple Output Formats: Supports both human-friendly text and machine-readable JSONL.
• Detailed Information: Extracts filenames, view options, window bounds, modification dates, and other metadata stored in the .DS_Store file.

Installation & Compilation

You must have Go installed on your system.

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone [https://github.com/herpf/ds_store_parser_go.git](https://github.com/herpf/ds_store_parser_go.git)
   cd ds_store_parser_go

2. Fetch dependencies: This command reads the go.mod file and downloads the necessary libraries.

   go mod tidy

3. Build the binary: This compiles the source code into a single executable file named ds_store_parser.

   go build -o ds_store_parser .

Usage

The tool can be run against a .DS_Store file. If no file is specified, it defaults to looking for one in the current directory.

Human-Readable Output (Default)

This format is best for manual inspection.

# Parse the .DS_Store in the current directory
./ds_store_parser

# Parse a specific file
./ds_store_parser /path/to/some/.DS_Store

JSONL Output

This format outputs one JSON object per line.

# Parse a specific file and output as JSONL
./ds_store_parser -output jsonl /path/to/some/.DS_Store

# Example with jq to filter for a specific filename
./ds_store_parser -output jsonl ../ds_test3 | jq '. | select(.filename=="untitled folder")'

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.