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Wowfunhappy

Thank god.

Yes, logically, if I drag a file into the Terminal, I want Terminal to be able to access that file.

Should be documented somewhere, probably, but very clearly a positive change.

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It's good except--- it being permanent and you can't take the right away is a bit surprising.

But that's a result of the Agile way of development. The MVP is "be able to drag a program to the terminal and run it", and the next feature, way down on the backlog is "allow the user to revoke permissions granted by dragged-in apps"

It's actually the result of product-owners deciding to release unfinished software, likely responding to incentives from management to ship (boolean) without clear standards about what is shippable (non-boolean).

I think you're trying to derive too much insight from a small change like this.

I agree, but it's not an unfair comment in light of what a mess Catalina and iOS 13 have been as a whole.

Software always is and always will be unfinished.

This isn’t an MVP. Its an existing system with an existing set of user expectations that should be enhanced not reduced.

I don't like this... but in fairness, this is not a regression.

The Documents folder was not protected from Terminal before Catalina. Now, items in Documents are protected unless you explicitly drag them into Terminal-- but there's no way to "re-protect" them.

That is, at worst, users are in the situation they were before Catalina.

I agree, but why is it using an entirely separate and unmanageable variant rather than the normal privilege UI/tracking?

It is a good idea done via an undocumented hack.

The normal privilege UI of drag-n-drop indicating file access intent has been around for many years in macOS.

The tracking has been through signed bookmarks, with no specific place for apps to persist this info. Keeping it in an xattr for ACLs seems like a great solution, and the exact opposite of a “hack”.

By the same logic, typing out the filename should make the same permissions change, no?

No. The action of pasting or dropping the file is what gives access.

I wasn't saying that to suggest a practical use of this "bug", just to point out that if it were as intentional as the above commend suggested then it should have been expanded to other methods of listing the file directory like typing it in.

Unless you want the OS to spy on the keyboard this is near-impossible to pull off. And even then it's very hard to do well (backspace, tab auto-completion of paths, copy+paste, etc).

You can do this via any file dialog, if you like. I don’t know offhand if Terminal has any open file dialogs, though.

The issue is that the granted permission persists across reboots, and worse, cannot be revoked.

Thats what folks want though (persist across reboots). Let's say you have a script that works now, you reboot, all of a sudden terminal can't call it until you re-drag it?

Drag&drop maybe (although I’ve dropped more things accidentally on the wrong target than I’d care to admit). Copy&paste? Often accidental.

It should still ask. Explicit is better than implicit.

Life is too short to click a million permissions dialogues for everything I do on my machine.

How about you configure your system that you don't get those "million permissions dialogues" (you must copy/paste a lot...), and then the rest of us will have to just confirm temporary changes like these?

Every time you drag an image into a document, should it throw a prompt asking for permission to do the thing you explicitly did?

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