"You are opening XXX.app for the first time"

[simbalala]

I’m running 10.4.11 and we know the launch services database has its problems. When I (or you) use the contextual menu item to choose which app to open a file with you’ll often see duplicates. The solution is to rebuild the launch services database.

I dislike the warnings that pop up after this telling me “I’m opening an application for the first time and do I want to continue?”.

So I looked in the prefs folder for finder and launch services and examined those prefs files for a switch I could flip to turn off this warning. So far I’ve not found it.

Does anyone know where this exists or if there’s a terminal command with which I could install the pref (if it exists)?

[simbalala]

I found this but it seems a little extreme:

This is it! I downloaded and installed Firefox from my admin account, but never launched it. I'd get that dialog every time I tried to launch it from the user account. Based upon your post, I ran Firefox once from the admin account and now the user account opens it without the warning. Thanks,

I couldn't do that because I had deleted the user that had downloaded and installed it.

But I opened terminal, and did the following
cd /Applications/
sudo chown root MyApp.app
[type your password]

The problem was that the owner was someone else.

There's more in this thread at the MacOSHints forum.

And this one.

There should just be a switch, I'm not sure I want to declare all my apps to be owned by root.

[simbalala]

OK, I’ve got this thread all to myself.

Further explanation is needed. When I download an app I’m not sure I want to keep or maybe a beta version of one which exists in my /Applications folder I put it in my user Applications folder (~/Applications). For example I run the WebKit Nightlies and I keep WebKit in ~/Applications.

So after thinking about the solution in the thread I linked above I checked the ownership of the contents in both the /Applications and the ~/Applications folders. In ~/Applications the file group owner was me and in /Applications the group was wheel.

So I recursively changed the group owner on my ~/Applications folder to wheel and rebuilt the Launch Services Database.

Ta Da! No more warnings. To me this means I can rebuild the Launch Services Database as often as I wish and not have to put up with those annoying warnings. Of course I’ll have to change group to wheel on any new additions to ~/Applications but I can live with that.

Update:

Since I’ve changed the group owner to wheel on the ~/Applications folder itself any new apps copied into the folder inherit the folder’s group owner so I have less hassle to deal with.

I also did a “Verify Permissions” using Disk Utility and it doesn’t seem to care that I changed the group owner on ~/Applications, no error.