Missing “show package contents” cmd

Question

I was trying to extract the contents of a .pkg file, and right clicking on it should usually allow the context sensitive Show Package Contents option. However, it does not seem to show on any .pkg file I can find on my system.

I have since expanded the contents on the command line using this command:

StuffeMac:Desktop stuffe$ pkgutil --expand AirPortUtility56.pkg ./dan2/

Which worked fine, and inside this package was another .pkg file. Right clicking on this and Show Package Contents is back again, but only for the one I just expanded...

What's going on?

Answer 1

Show Package Contents is not for showing the contents of .pkg files, it's for showing the hidden structure for Applications (and other bundles), which are actually folders. You can use the program Pacifist to look at the contents of .pkg files.

To answer the question in your comment, here's how you can tell in Terminal. When you perform an ls -l command, directories have d as the first character in the line.

516 $ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x    3 steve  admin         102 Jan  6  2011 Form Viewer.app
drwxrwxrwx@   3 root   admin         102 Jan 18  2010 FormViewerFonts.pkg
-rw-r--r--@   1 steve  staff  2157020198 Jun 30  2012 MacTeX-2012.pkg

In this example, the first two entries are bundles and the last isn't.

Answer 2

Quick and Easy:

• "Duplicate" package file.
• Righ-Click and Run "Show package contents" on the duplicate file