It looks like they store the extended attributes in the __MACOSX tree too. And everything you download from the web has extended attributes describing the original URL and page that linked to it. (With chrome/safari, I haven't checked firefox.)
It looks like the finder "compress" functionality will include __MACOSX, and the command line zip doesn't.
If you run `xattr -l` on something in your Downloads, you should see the kMDItemWhereFroms metadata. mdls shows it too, but also includes other data that is extracted from the file itself.
It looks like the finder "compress" functionality will include __MACOSX, and the command line zip doesn't.
If you run `xattr -l` on something in your Downloads, you should see the kMDItemWhereFroms metadata. mdls shows it too, but also includes other data that is extracted from the file itself.
You can also search on that metadata: