- Messages
- 34,670
- Edit My Images
- Yes
Maybe try this
Continuing on with the theme of inspecting the contents of app installers, you can also extract package files and sort through their contents without actually installing them. To do this, you can often just right-click on a pkg file and select “Show Package Contents” – but that isn’t always displayed. Assuming that option is unavailable, we can extract .pkg files using a command line tool called pkgutil that is bundled with OS X:
You’ll notice that some package files contain even more package files, quickly leading you into a deeply nested package extraction process. Other than that, this is an excellent way to see what’s contained within packages, particularly the ones where the alt-click “Show Package Contents” option isn’t available, which is increasingly common in Mac OS X Lion, although ultimately it depends on how the package was constructed.
- Launch Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities/)
- Use the following syntax:
pkgutil --expand/path/to/package.pkg /output/destination/
Hint: recall that you can drag & drop items into the Terminal to print their full path, making this tip easier by typing: pkgutil –expand [drop file here] /destination/path/
![]()
- Go to the outputs path in the Finder and check out the extracted files
Trevor, you had me right up until "Maybe try this".

Thank you for your efforts but, as per my post above, I'm not desperate and it looks like I need some other software that isn't available for Macs yet so I'll wait until such a time as there is a coming together of the different worlds.
Untitled
