fixing corrupt .plist files

Hi Arthur

Is there an example plist where this doesn't work as before... Safari, Finder, some standard application ?

I've noticed individual plist items get reset/corrected.

I don't have a com.apple.desktop.plist.

The desktop picture setting seems to be stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/desktoppicture.db

Trash that & restart Dock, and it returns to default & recreates the file.

You may need to search for recently updated files in more than Preferences.

It's a very good question regarding plists generally. You may have seen Apple's mention of it, although the caching seems much more agressive in Mavericks, & eg Safari requires quitting cfprefsd, or a restart (logging out/in isn't enough) for removing/replacing the plist file to have any effect, here anyway.

In 10.8 and later, the CFPreferences agent process (cfprefsd) will cache information from these files and asynchronously write to them. This means that directly modifying plist files is unlikely to have the expected results (new settings will not necessarily be read, and may even be overwritten). You should use the NSUserDefaults or CFPreferences APIs, or the defaults(1) command, to interact with the preferences system.

Also see NSUserDefaults seems to cache values somewhere

which requires a free developer account, but has more details from someone at Apple.

In another thread there, the same person said that logging out/in worked, although that wasn't my experience, since the user process cfprefsd continued to run.

I have the problem with Mavericks that my application folder is not showing any application or folder in it anymore, except one programm I installed lately. There is no apple.finder.plist in Library I could delete, also not the apple.finder.sidebar.plist. Using a terminal command also just brings the result no file found. Is there something I can do about this?

Thank you for any help.

I must say: Do not update on Mavericks: Pages, Numers, Finder, Cloud applications everything total bugy, nothing works anymore as it should, great mess here unfortunately.

I have found that the Mavericks version of Apple Mail is using a folder:

...../Library/Containers/com.apple.mail

I had to disable this folder to get Mail to do a clean restart of Mail.

This latest version of Mail may not be using ...../Library/Preferences for its plists.

The listing of directories to clean up under Lion is given at http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/30621/how-do-i-reset-apples-mail-in-lio n-to-default-settings/119277#119277 but I couldn't start up Mail at all until I had disabled also the Containers folder.

The preferences files for Mail App are located in:

~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData

~/Library… means your local Library folder.

To see your local Library folder, press Option while clicking on the Go menu in the Finder.

The preferences files use plist extensions. For example, Accounts.plist contains settings for each of your accounts, including how each account handles Drafts and Junk.

The Container folder is part of the sandboxing design Apple uses for application security.