Terminal Tips: Check Your Prefs

Here's another quick maintenance check you can run from the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/). Launch the Terminal and at the command line type:

sudo plutil ~/Library/Preferences/*.plist

This will run plutil, which checks all the preferences inside your User folder for any corruption. The -s handle in the command suppresses any reporting of preferences that check out, so only ones with errors show up. Looks like two files on my system are not parsing correctly due to non UTF-8 characters. That's not that big of a deal, so I'll leave it alone.

However, if you're having an app crash regularly and its preference file shows up in this list, then you should drag the preference file to the Trash. This little corrupt file could be what's causing the crash. A replacement pref file will appear the next time you launch the app.

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Here's another quick maintenance check you can run from the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/). Launch the Terminal and at the...

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Aaron Jacobs

Why the sudo? There should be no reason to use sudo when checking your user's preferences (which should all be owned by you), and it is in fact a good idea to not use sudo when unnecessary to avoid security problems and mistakes.

May 12 2005 at 6:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

teece

Does plist recurse? There are folders in the directory you mentioned, I am curious if I should root them all out with find.

May 12 2005 at 5:53 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

daggerquill

Great hint! (I always forget about plutil. But why not check the system prefs under /Library while you're going? Or on a system with a couple of useres, why not check the entire system at once: sudo find / -name *.plist | plutil -s

May 12 2005 at 4:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply