You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

What are all these strange .plist's I'm seeing?

Just took a look in my HD > USER > LIBRARY > PREFERENCES FOLDER ... and I see a lot of strange "repetitive" plists.


These are SOME of the strange listings:



User uploaded file


User uploaded file


User uploaded file


User uploaded file


User uploaded file


User uploaded file



... and this kind of "duplicate" .plist occurs with many other preferences in the "Preference Folder" as well.

Some are fine, others have one or more duplicates with strange numbers and characters after them.


I can see that the top .plist icons are using the "textwrangler" icon, and that all others that follow, don't have the "textwrangler" icon ... but are instead "blank" white page icon.



DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT"S GOING ON HERE ... and why ALL these "duplicate" .plists are being created

AND HOW TO FIX THIS ISSUE?



Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I know this is not normal OSX behavior


iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2012), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4), Apple Superdrive

Posted on Jan 8, 2014 8:15 PM

Reply
5 replies
Sort By: 

Jan 9, 2014 5:12 AM in response to DavidMac

They are not "duplicates" because they all have different file names.

If they bother you you can delete them without harm or issue. The .plist file stores the settings you choose for most apps. If the .plist file is deleted a new one will be created using the "default" settings for that app.

Reply

Jan 10, 2014 12:48 AM in response to QuickTimeKirk

Thanks for the input.


After looking into the whole situation, over the last day or so, I also came across these similar questions on the Apple discussion site:



What are these strange additional...: Apple Support Communities


Why so so many plist files?: Apple Support Communities




Also, I came across this one articles which greatly helped me understand waht all these various "strange" mac .plist files were ... and how to deal with them:



Lockfiles and other plist file subtypes in OS X Lion | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews

Reply

Jan 10, 2014 12:52 AM in response to DavidMac

This is the basic explanation for these "strange .plists:

(Read the CNET link in the above discussion window above)



Temporary plist files

Part of the way the system manages preferences files is a protection method for preventing corruption from happening if an error occurs when the system is writing preference files. For instance, if you are saving settings for a program and the system suddenly loses power, then the preferences file being written to may get corrupted and won't open properly when the system is restarted, which would result in all your settings being lost. To combat this, the system creates a temporary file to save the new settings, and when the file is properly saved, it then replaces the old file with the new one.

In OS X 10.6 or earlier, if you look in the preferences folder you may see a number of property list files with a string of eight characters after their names, such as the following:

com.apple.iTunes.plist
com.apple.iTunes.plist.3847EH45
com.apple.iTunes.plist.2GDH17DJ
com.apple.iTunes.plist.37D6JH25
...etc.

All of the files with eight-character strings appended to their names will be 0KB in size, and are the temporary files that were used for a specific preference saving instance. The temporary file should be deleted automatically, but sometimes odd problems may result in them sticking around. The accumulation of these temporary preference files may have been corrected in Lion, but if you are running Snow Leopard or Leopard, then you will likely see them appear after a while of using your system. You can safely remove them from your system if they begin to accumulate over time.

Reply

What are all these strange .plist's I'm seeing?

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.