*.plist files and folders

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Level 1

16 points

*.plist files and folders

Whilst looking at the Login Items page and finding a few "item from unidentified developer" tags in there, I decided to have a look at the folder containing these files, and was surprised to find so many.

I guess these are a legacy from all the software tried, tested and deleted, but what surprised me even more are the number of empty folders, with blank names or named with stuff like '[', and files with extended suffixes, e.g. *.plist.6i6Ifm3

There are also a number of "locked" files with very long names which seem to be a duplicates of a same named file, like these:

com.apple.TextEdit.SandboxedPersistentURLs.LSSharedFileList

com.apple.TextEdit.SandboxedPersistentURLs.LSSharedFileList.lockfile

Can any of these be safely deleted, please?

Thanks

iMac Pro

Posted on Dec 6, 2022 1:25 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Luis Sequeira1

Level 9

64,748 points

Dec 6, 2022 6:35 AM in response to Nightowl4933

(A little note: to indicate a path, on Unix systems one uses the forward slash "/" (unlike Windows, which uses the backslash, "\"))

In principle, you can delete stuff from Preferences folders, and it should do no harm.

There should not be any .plist files in /Library, anyway.

To be clear, I don't think that these are doing anything by themselves. These files, in this particular location, are there to store the preferences for particular applications (but most of those live in the user's own Library, in ~/Library/Preferences).

If the preferences for an application are deleted, the application will create a new file with default settings the next time it runs.

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