Why is there "com.apple" instead of "apple.com" on my iMac ?

An "apple.com" format is used for an internet address.

The "com.apple" format is used in OS X for a great many of the preference files (".plist" files) used by OS X. If you go to the article John Galt linked to, you'll see many variants of that, such as "com.adobe" and "com.microsoft".

I show most of the items you list in the Preferences folder in the Library folder at the root level of my boot volume. Mine also include a few you do not list, which is to be expected. These would be common-to-all-users prefs files.

User-level prefs files are in the Preferences folder in the hidden Library folder in the user home folder. Easy access to that hidden Library folder: while in Finder, hold down the Option key while opening the Go menu in the main menubar; select the item Library.

Note - it's usually not a good idea to throw away or otherwise remove any files in Library or System folders unless you know for sure that that is the right thing to do.

It hasn't "taken over" your imac. As discussed above the majority of them are plists (i.e., preference files). Don't worry about the naming convention or where it came from. It's not important.

On the other hand if you are seeing things like,

com.apple.foobar.plist.XXXXXX

where the X's are a bunch of what look like random letters and digits, then those are garbage from the system forgetting to remove these temp file used to update the actual plist (com.apple.foobar.plist in this example). There are situations where you will find hundreds of these things for a single plist.

My system tends to accumulate pbs.plist.xxxxxx's, so much so that I remove them in my daily maintenance.

So I have to ask, is this what you are seeing? A large number of com.apple.foobar.plist.XXXXXX's for the same "foobar"?

I was wondering about the origin of com dot, why this was chosen as a naming scheme for those pref files. What does com dot tell the system? Did com dot orignate before or after dot com? And is it only an accident they are so similar?

One of the challenges facing application developers is the proliferation of methods to identify types of data. For example, some text files may be assigned a

'TEXT'

file type (as originally designed for Mac OS 9 and earlier), while others may simply have a

.txt

filename extension. Some may have the

.text

extension instead. In addition, some file types might be subsets of other types; an application that opens all

.txt

files should probably also be able to open those with a

.html

extension. Determining all the possible files an application could read could become impossible. The user experience then suffers, with users not understanding why an application can open one text file but not another.

To solve this problem, Apple has defined a syntax for special data identifiers called uniform type identifiers. Each UTI provides a unique identifier for a particular file type, data type, directory or bundle type, and so on. In addition, other type identifier namespaces for a particular type can be grouped under one UTI, with utility functions available to translate from one format to another.

This document is for Mac OS X and iOS application developers that need to create or otherwise manipulate data that may be exchanged with other applications or services. For example, applications often need to be aware of the type of data they handle when:

• Displaying, or manipulating, files, bundles, or folders
• Accessing streaming data
• Copying and pasting between documents or applications
• Dragging and dropping between applications

Support for uniform type identifiers is available in Mac OS X v10.3 and later and iOS 3.0 and later.

This answer really begs the question -- I don't have a good answer and it would be interesting if someone else can explain the origin -- but that's how Apple names some files. They are not Internet addresses.

These are all preference files, I wouldn't touch them if I were you.

Here is a detailed explanation:

Almost every Mac OS X application allows you to customize its settings. This is typically done by selecting the Preferences command from the application's "application" menu. Let's use TextEdit as an example. Go to the menu named TextEdit. The second item is "Preferences." Select it. The window that opens has two tabs" "New Document" and "Open and Save." In each case, you can make changes to TextEdit's default settings. For example, you can change the default fonts of Monaco 10 and Helvetica 12 to whatever else you may prefer. You can similarly decide whether or not a .txt extension should be automatically appended to the names of plain text files when you save them. And so on.

The point here is that when you make these preferences changes, they are "remembered." That is, if you quit and relaunch the application (even if you shut down and restart your Mac), the changes you made will still be in effect. Not only that, if you have multiple user accounts on your Mac, each user has their own preferences settings. This means that any changes you make will not affect the settings for any other user and vice versa. In brief, each user can customize the settings for each application to suit their own preferences (hence the name).

How does Mac OS X accomplish this feat? It does so by maintaining a preferences file for each application. Any changes a user makes in the Preferences dialog are stored in the application's preferences file. The application checks this file on launch to determine what settings to use. Further, each user maintains a separate preferences file that is only in effect when that user is logged in. That's how each user can have their own settings.

System-Declared Uniform Type Identifiers,perhaps?

explain further.

A dyslexic Apple employee?

RM

Most of my questions answered in edited post, above, except for an explanation about why Apple chose com dot. Thanks John.