macmru

Script Update - Mac MRU Parser v1.5 - Added Volume Analysis Support and Other Stuff!

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Added volume analysis support for the following plists. These are not really MRUs but it could be damn useful to gather this info.

  • Sidebar List plist [10.12-] - /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
  • Favorite Volumes SFL2 - [10.13+] /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteVolumes.sfl2
  • Finder Plist - /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
    • I was parsing FXRecentFolders Key, I've added FXDesktopVolumePositions Key
    • FXDesktopVolumePositions has a volume creation timestamp embedded into the "file" name for the volume (highlight in yellow below). This has been extracted and converted to human readable time (highlight in orange below).

Thanks to @4n68r for pointing out broke stuff (and for using the script!)

  • The ICNS Icon export function was also fixed.
  • Fixed support for some *.sfl2 files that were cranky and had no names.
  • Documentation/Spelling

Script Update - Mac MRU Parser - Spotlight Shortcuts & BLOB Parsing!

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Added in Spotlight Shortcuts

I've updated my macMRU.py script to parse the Spotlight Shortcuts plist file that I consider to be very MRU-like. This plist file contains what the user typed into the Spotlight search window, what they clicked on, and when this all occurred. You can find artifacts of application usage, documents, emails, photos, etc.

Bookmark and Alias BLOB Parsing

The second part of the update (and probably the most requested!) was to add in arguments to allow the analyst to see the parse out the Bookmark and Alias BLOB data. Previously the script only had an option to show the BLOB hexdump. Using mac_alias [download here], the script can now parse these BLOBs. This comes with a caveat, this script relies on the documented structures by others (with a few minor changes by my own research). These have not been officially documented by Apple therefore YMMV. Many of us are still researching these, hopefully this script will help the process! This update provides three new arguments:

  • --blob_hex = This is the same as what --blob was before. Just a hexdump of the BLOB data.
  • --blob_parse_raw = This shows the raw output from mac_alias, not exactly the easiest to read but good for debugging.
  • --blob_parse_human = This shows the pieces of the BLOBs in a (mostly) human-friendly (example below).

I want to say thank you to a few folks that allowed these additions to be made:

  • Alastair Houghton & Wim Lewis - For mac_alias and the reversing the Alias/Bookmark structures. I took a shot at it years ago and gave up, really appreciate someone else's effort!
  • Phill Moore of thisweekin4n6.com - You'll notice some support for legacy keys in the com.apple.recentitems.plist have also been added in this update thanks to Phil and his oddly old MRUs files! :) I also appreciate his testing of this tool on Windows also. (Sorry Phil, didn't get a chance to test it on Windows yet!) 
  • Shout out to Patrick Olsen for his work on Alias V3 structures. Unfortunately I did not get to use his research - turns out V3 Alias BLOBs do not get used in any of the MRUs that I'm parsing in this script (they are all V2)! Maybe in the future!

Update to MacMRU Parser - Now with Microsoft Office Support!

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I've updated my MacMRU parser script, located here: https://github.com/mac4n6/macMRU-Parser.

This update includes support for 'Most Recently Used' artifacts for Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 and 2016. I've also added a bit more error checking, so please let me know if you come across a plist that doesn't work or does not contain certain expected keys. It happens, I've run across a few myself - I can't explain why now, but I hope to look into it further.

While researching for this update I noticed something interesting. Microsoft Office used a binary plist format for the 2011 version of the software, but "downgraded" to an XML-based plist format in the 2016 version. Most of the time I see plists headed in the XML->Binary direction.

Got a MacMRU file that I don't parse? Please let me know!

I hope you find this script useful!