Multiple preference files

It's good to know they are common, if they are. I'd surmised they were empty files that weren't being deleted as they are all zero KB in size. But...

My concern stemmed from that until recently, I hadn't seen any of these before, then I had an issue with the Finder window keep bringing itself to the front every few seconds. I resolved this with a safe boot and restart, but when I looked deeper at the time, I found a bunch of these duplicate pref files for the finder.

At the time these duplicates appeared in the library folder itself rather than the pref folder within the library folder, I deleted them. At the time they were the only such duplicates, now I have many of them and from different processes. It just concerned me.

Not all of them

OK, they are property list files, whilst only some might contain configuration settings, I did feel that as they reside in a folder named preferences that referring to them as preference files would have been sufficient for reference purposes.

Which library/preferences folder? There 3 different ones that I can think of off the top of my head.

They are from the Home library and are found in the Preferences folder within that library. I had thought that things like the FontBook.plist for example, would only be found in the users folders so didn't feel the need to be more precise. I apologise if they also appear in the other preference folders you refer to.

Some of what you have listed looks like it could be some kind of lock file

I didn't realise this, all the lock files I've seen get allocated a different name to the process itself and a different extension (i.e. Lock0001.flk) but I'll watch out for them looking like plist file and being saved to the preferences folder going forward.

I don't have any of those in my preference folders

That confuses me a bit, I thought that everyone would, for example, have a FontBook.plist or an iCal.plist in their preference folder. I can't imagine what circumstances would lead you not to have them, but as I know you know your stuff, I'll accept that this can be the case.

I don't know what other differences there are between my system and yours in terms of OS version, filesystem....

I did post details of my system in the opening thread (10.15.4). I didn't realise I'd need to post details of my file system, but in anycase had thought that APFS had been the filesystem since 10.13 and before the release of the iMac I have.

dialabrain wrote:

FWIW, I found a few examples in ~/Library/Preferences & /Library/Preferences. Some from 2017, 2018 & 2019. I deleted them all and so far nothing has blown up. :)

That made me take another look. I'd believed they had all appeared in the last month, but this is not the case. they all seem to be from quite a long time ago, indeed all seem to have creation dates from when I had my Mac Pro (The Mac I had prior to this one), so it seems that, other than my issue with the Finder a month ago, all these files came over when I migrated from my previous Mac.

I'm going to delete them all for housekeeping purposes, I suspect nothing will occur because of this and even if it does they'll likely recreate themselves if they were needed.

They are preference files in the library/preferences folder, most of the duplicates are from Apple processes.

I see now.