mac-robber mit Homebrew, apt, dnf, Nix, zypper installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream-Dokumentation
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• mac-robber

Projektgeschichte

The Sleuth Kit site traces mac-robber to the early open-source UNIX forensics lineage around The Coroner's Toolkit. In the February 2003 Sleuth Kit Informer, Brian Carrier described writing mac-robber as similar to Rob Lee's mac-daddy, itself a variation of TCT's grave-robber, but implemented in C instead of Perl.

The project page describes the tool's scope and limits: it requires the file system to be mounted by the operating system, does not collect deleted files or files hidden by rootkits, and can modify directory access times when run against writable mounts. Those limitations are part of its forensic model rather than incidental bugs.

Adoptionsgeschichte

mac-robber has remained useful because it covers file systems that The Sleuth Kit or other file-system analysis tools may not support directly. The official page calls out obscure UNIX file systems and common UNIX systems such as AIX as use cases.

Package metadata shows mac-robber distributed through Homebrew and several Unix/Linux package managers. Its adoption is niche, but it is durable niche software: the 1.02 release from 2010 is still packaged because the body-file/mactime workflow remains recognizable to forensic practitioners.

Wie es verwendet wird

The tool is used during live incident response or lab analysis when a suspect file system has been mounted, ideally read-only on a trusted system. Its output is consumed by mactime to produce a timeline of file activity.

The official page warns that mac-robber is basic C intended to compile on any UNIX system, but also that it cannot see deleted or rootkit-hidden files because it relies on the mounted file-system view exposed by the operating system.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

mac-robber is package-nerd significant because it is a tiny, old, command-line forensic utility whose value comes from interoperability with a larger toolchain. It represents the classic Unix package pattern: one focused binary, plain-text output, and composition with mactime.

Zeitleiste

• 2000: The Coroner's Toolkit released, establishing the open-source UNIX forensics lineage cited by The Sleuth Kit.
• 2003-02: The Sleuth Kit Informer described mac-robber as a C tool derived from the mac-daddy/grave-robber idea.
• 2010-02: mac-robber 1.02 released with the newer mactime body format.
• 2026: The official mac-robber project page links the 1.02 source release to the sleuthkit/mac-robber GitHub repository.

Related projects

• Related tools include The Coroner's Toolkit, grave-robber, mac-daddy, The Sleuth Kit, and mactime. mac-robber is best understood as a companion collector for timeline analysis rather than a standalone forensic suite.

Quellen

• https://github.com/sleuthkit/mac-robber
• https://www.sleuthkit.org/informer/sleuthkit-informer-1.html
• https://www.sleuthkit.org/mac-robber
• https://www.sleuthkit.org/sleuthkit/man/mactime.html
• source_facts.package-manager