Can't edit or delete mac contacts

Linc, your Step 1 Terminal command line worked a treat for my identical Contacts "Edit, Delete" problem. You're a Level 11 man on my book.

Cheers! 🙂

jgoshawk: Thanks for that solution. I did exactly as you said, I did not need to do step 2. This did not work even after I rebooted. Are there any other options or do I simply have to live with this **** issue?

Aloha Linc! I have a macbook pro mid 2010, running 10.9.4 Mavericks. I am the only admin. and user. I can't delete the contacts or groups after trying your suggestions as per Mountain Lion. I would actually like to reset my home permissions to default, as well as the system permissions. My trusted mac has given me no grief until I loaded the accursed Mavricks. Now everything is buggered, trouble everywhere, and I even think I have 'malwear' which I never thought a mac could get.

1. Trying the terminal paste solution I got this.

Last login: Mon Sep 15 20:56:54 on console

[The-Fatmans-Laptop:~] rick% { sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -R $UID:staff ~ $_ ; sudo chmod -R u+rwX ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ ; } 2> /dev/null

Bad substitute.

[The-Fatmans-Laptop:~] rick%

2. Trying the reboot to recovery, utilities, well when I got there I could find no 'terminal' in the menu bar to get there.

You look like the 'go to' guy for all things mac. Can you give me a hand reseting all the permissions to default? If not, I'm more than ready to go back to Mountain Lion, and give Mavericks a miss till they get it out of 'beta' testing 😉 with all the bugs out.

Thanks mate.

Step 1 worked for me too. Had to run it twice but now my contacts are working. Thank you!!!

It may not be the system. It may be that you have allowed some other software to add contacts to your address book. Sorry, but I think going into recovery mode and resetting all permissions is a bit extreme.

I had the same problem, but it was because I had enabled Mac to access my LinkedIn contacts. Once I un-enabled this, the cards that remained are ones that I can add or delete. It also, thankfully, removed birthday reminders from my Mac calendar about colleagues' birthdays. (Really, I don't need to know this. If I am close enough to them, I'll already know about it.)

Go to Contacts ==> Preferences ==> Accounts

Then I clicked on "LinkedIn" and unchecked the box to un-enable access.

Thanks so much for this suggestion, Linc. It worked a charm for my Contacts, too, after Yosemite sent them south.

Thanks for this advice - I was experiencing the same problem and your simple, thorough explanation perfectly solved it for me.

Solved my issue as well. But I wish I knew just what was done to make it happen.

Anyone with enough Unix knowledge to describe what happened in terminal?

I found this to be true the hard way, by trial and error. You have to go to the source of the contacts be it linked-in or gmail, or iCloud. The apple official instruction to go to the contact and click delete only applies to mac and iOS contacts. Go to preferences and disable the account or go to - example gmail- and delete from there.

This might be somewhat unrelated but I could not delete certain contacts and I went into system preferences, accounts, and unchecked the "contacts" in them and the unwanted ones disappeared.

I had the same issue: my contacts I wanted deleted were not in iCloud but in LinkedIn 😕

Contacts does not show the source where the particular contact is stored.

You are very thorough with your explanations. You must do this for a living.

My Unix is a little rusty (20 years ago) but I can understand the intent of the commands.

It worked for me too.

Thank you.