10.8.3 update and ShareKitHelper crashing

Problems such as yours are sometimes caused by files that should belong to you but are locked or have wrong permissions. This procedure will check for such files. It makes no changes and therefore will not, in itself, solve your problem.

First, empty the Trash.

Triple-click the line below to select it, then copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):

find ~ $TMPDIR.. \( -flags +sappnd,schg,uappnd,uchg -o ! -user $UID -o ! -perm -600 -o -acl \) 2> /dev/null | wc -l

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.

The output of this command, on a line directly below what you entered, will be a number such as "41." Please post it in a reply.

Back up all data. Don't continue unless you're sure you can restore from a backup, even if you're unable to log in.

This procedure will unlock all your user files (not system files) and reset their ownership and access-control lists to the default. If you've set special values for those attributes on any of your files, they will be reverted. In that case, either stop here, or be prepared to recreate the settings if necessary. Do so only after verifying that those settings didn't cause the problem. If none of this is meaningful to you, you don't need to worry about it.

Step 1

If you have more than one user account, and the one in question is not an administrator account, then temporarily promote it to administrator status in the Users & Groups preference pane. To do that, unlock the preference pane using the credentials of an administrator, check the box marked Allow user to administer this computer, then reboot. You can demote the problem account back to standard status when this step has been completed.

Triple-click the following line to select it. Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C):

{ sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -Rh $UID:staff ~ $_ ; sudo chmod -R u+rwX ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ ; } 2> /dev/null

Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning to be careful. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.

The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear, then quit Terminal.

Step 2 (optional)

Step 1 should give you usable permissions in your home folder. This step will restore special attributes set by OS X on some user folders to protect them from unintended deletion or renaming. You can skip this step if you don't consider that protection to be necessary, and if everything is working as expected after step 1.

Boot into Recovery by holding down the key combination command-R at startup. Release the keys when you see a gray screen with a spinning dial.

When the OS X Utilities screen appears, select

Utilities ▹ Terminal

from the menu bar. A Terminal window will open.

In the Terminal window, type this:

res

Press the tab key. The partial command you typed will automatically be completed to this:

resetpassword

Press return. A Reset Password window will open. You’re not going to reset a password.

Select your boot volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name) if not already selected.

Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.

Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.

Select

 ▹ Restart

from the menu bar.

I have the exact same symptom. I've done the above two step sudo chmod commands and the reset of permissions and ACLs. . .restarted and no effect.

I then manually updated to 10.8.3 (vice auto-update first time) with the new permission in place in case something had gone awry on my first install. Restarted and again, same thing.

Application Specific Information:

Sandbox creation failed: Container object initialization failed: NSCocoaErrorDomain:513 “com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist” couldn’t be moved because you don’t have permission to access “Preferences”.

Source: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Pa ges.plist

Dest: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/OldData/20130318T212608.10-0400/Library/Pre ferences/com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist

Looking in the directories, I wonder if the permissions aren't a red herring. The Dest directory permissions look find and I even cd'd to the destination directory as the user and ran a touch command to create a dummy file without issue. The source reference, however, is a link to a file that doesn't exist:

$ cd ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences

$ ls -ltr *ork*

lrwxrwxr-x+ 1 username staff 54 Mar 3 14:21 com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist -> ../../../../../Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Pages.plist

$ cd ../../../../../Preferences

$ ls -ltr *ork*

-rw------- 1 username staff 182 Mar 18 21:15 com.apple.frameworks.diskimages.diuiagent.plist

Not that this helps me get to my mail. . .wondering if I should just delete the preferences. This is a brand new machine for my wife who hasn't really used it yet, I'd just like to avoid the pain that was importing 5years of email from Outlook.

Thanks. I went ahead and moved the containers directory and that immediately allowed me access to mail. Mail isn't connecting right now, but I'm thinking the reboot will get me there (unfortunately had to run out for work). Just curious on the root cause and based on you hunch of ShareKitHelper, had you modified any file level permissions? I had changed my wife's Pictures directory permissions so that I could point my iphoto to her library. . .wondering if that may have confused the update.

I'll let you know if the reboot made all well again when I get home.

I had exactly the same problem this evening after running the latest OSX update. I tried the simple fix of moving the Containers folder to the desktop (and renaming it for good measure) - it worked, so thanks jimoly for the tip.

Does anyone know what the Containers folder is for anyway? I notice that most of the files at the end of the directory trees under Containers are aliases, including the com.apple.iWork.pages.plist 'file' that the crash report mentioned. As far as I could see there was nothing unusual about the permissions set on my ~/Library folders anyway, so I agree with EagleNdc's comment that permissions is probably a red herring.

Anyway, moving the Contatiners folder and allowing OSX (and/or apps - I'm not sure which it is) to re-create it seems to have worked.

This solution is what worked for me! I was having a similar problem and message when trying to open Preview.I stumbled across a range of other permissions-related suggestions for troubleshooting -- none of which worked, including the ones in this thread. The only think that worked was to move the "Containers" folder to the desktop and reboot. Preview worked again immediately after restart.

I wish I would have found/tried this first.

THANK YOU!

I think only the OP can specify those things. I do not seem to have the option. All I can do is "like" your post, which I did. I will try again here.

Thank you much for the post though. It really saved me, and I do appreciate it.

Thanks Linc!

Your instructions for how to reset the permissions and attributes cured many problems that I had been having!

What seems to happen when one removes the ~Library/Containers folder is this: OS X recreates the folder and changed the permissions as follows (from system.log):

restored permissions (100600 -> 100700) on /Users/priit/Library/Containers/com.apple.ShareKitHelper/Container.plist

Now, the permissions on that file look like this:

-rwx------ 1 priit staff 47416 14 dets 11:36 /Users/priit/Library/Containers/com.apple.ShareKitHelper/Container.plist

Since then, no more crash reports from ShareKitHelper under my account!