James Merkel wrote:
I was trying to come up with a way to prevent the user from starting at the wrong place. (Putting up an Alert that says you can't start there). There's a method in the NSFileManager class called isDeletableFileAtPath. I am thinking that all of those volumes and higher level directories that I want to avoid are not deletable. Therefore I could use this as a filter.
You should test that assumption. Test it when logged in as both a non-admin user and an admin user. You might be surprised.
You also might be surprised if Apple changes anything in permissions, ACLs, etc. and suddenly you get a whole lot more files than you planned for. So the whole premise seems a little shaky to me.
I'm not sure why you can't allow the user to start at "the volume level", if by that you mean the root filesystem whose pathname is /. If you want to limit depth, give the user a control to limit depth. If you want to limit number of files, give the user a control for that. Set reasonable defaults, but otherwise don't artificially limit what users can do. You don't know how they've setup their storage, and arbitrary limitations are obnoxious.
If your concern is traversing every mounted volume, there's an easy way to detect that: it's the device-id in the struct filled in by stat () (see man page for stat(2)). You don't have to decipher the device- id, you just have to check for a change in device-id to some value that differs from the device-id of where you started. For an example of controlling depth, traversal of volumes, etc. look at the man page for the 'find' command.
There are also readable attributes (flags and xattrs) that can offer clues as to whether a directory is hidden from the GUI or not. See man chflags, and man xattr. The idea here is to not traverse hidden dirs unless the user says it should. Some of these are also available as Spotlight metadata, so read up on that, too.
And don't put up any alert that says "You can't start there". Simply dim or don't show any items that should not be traversed. Few things are worse than a cycle of "You can't do that" alerts, when the proper course is to only show things that can be done.
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