Catalina’s Path Changes
If you write scripts of any kind for macOS – shell scripts, AppleScripts, or anything similar – now is the time to join the Catalina beta programme (if you’re not already signed up) if you want those scripts to work with macOS 10.15 when it’s released in a month or so. There are plenty of changes to security and privacy which you’ll need to check out, but my concern in this article is the effect of Catalina’s read-only system volume on paths – a topic which doesn’t seem to have been discussed much, but which may well break many scripts and apps.
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Reality is always more complex than a slide in a WWDC presentation, and there are a great many more folders/directories which are affected by this new division.
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Unfortunately, the illusion created by the Finder is unhelpful for identifying paths to be used in Terminal, scripts or apps: important new paths like
/System/Volumes/Data/aren’t shown there even when you enable the display of hidden items. Indeed, browsing the new folder hierarchy in the Finder looks very clean and simple, but will only cause endless confusion.
Previously:
