Is it possible to copy an individual file and preserve its comment?
Here is what I have tried. Nothing here works for me on macOS 14.3.1 and Zsh zsh 5.9 (x86_64-apple-darwin23.0).
cp file.txt file-copy.txt
cp -a file.txt file-copy.txt
rsync file.txt file-copy.txt
rsync -E file.txt file-copy.txt
The tags (red, orange, etc.) are always preserved, but not the comment.
If you run xattr file-copy.txt
, you will see that the com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment
extended attribute itself is preserved, but if you run mdls -name kMDItemFinderComment file-copy.txt
you will see that its value is ""
.