finder crashes when clicking desktop icon in sidebar - any help?

Thank you so much for your help! Deleting those .DS_Store files obviously did the trick. I have not experienced any Finder restarts since.

Thanks this also helped solve my related problem.

I was experiencing the finder crash whenever I changed to list view from the users home folder (other views were fine). This was being caused by a corrupted .DS_Store file(s).

This was compounded by the fact that the default view for new windows was the list view, so whenever I opened a new finder window it would immediately crash. Removing the finder.plist file solved this.

Next problem was didnt know which .DS_Store file was causing the problem, there were hundreds of these in sub-folders under the home folder. What I needed was a way to delete them all.

find . -type f -name \.DS_Store
find . -type f -name \.DS_Store - print0 | xargs rm

The first (Terminal) command would find (recursively) and list all of these files. The second command would then go through and delete all of the files.

Hope this helps someone else with similar problem.

PS. A tip I discovered along the way:
To set the default finder view mode, open a new finder window, set the appropriate view you want as a default then close the finder window. The next time you open a finder window the view will default to how you set it.

The correct command is.

find . -name \.DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Petrock, you're a genius! I've been fighting with the crashing Finder when clicking on Sidebar items every day since I upgraded last Fall. Finally, a fix that actually works. I followed your advice and so far (after 4 or 5 days) no Finder crashes!
Thank you!

Hi there hope you can help.

I have one particular folder on a NAS drive that crashes the finder when I try to open it. It happened to another of the folders on there a week ago and I solved it by replacing it with my backup copy and deleting the old version.

For this particular folder that is now giving me problems copying a backup isn't an option and the folder is quite large (60GB).

I ran the command you provided (find . -name \.DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 rm) to try and fix the problem but it deleted the contents of some of the folders on the desktop i.e deleted some videos, photos, docs etc and I lost a few other things like my iTunes music library prefs. Most of this stuff is recoverable but I still have the problem with the folder on my NAS drive that crashes finder.

Any ideas?

Hi there hope you can help.

I have one particular folder on a NAS drive that crashes the finder when I try to open it. It happened to another of the folders on there a week ago and I solved it by replacing it with my backup copy and deleting the old version.

For this particular folder that is now giving me problems copying a backup isn't an option and the folder is quite large (60GB).

I ran the command you provided (find . -name \.DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 rm) to try and fix the problem but it deleted the contents of some of the folders on the desktop i.e deleted some videos, photos, docs etc and I lost a few other things like my iTunes music library prefs. Most of this stuff is recoverable but I still have the problem with the folder on my NAS drive that crashes finder.

Any ideas?