Quicklook hanging Finder

Question

Quicklook hanging Finder

Without any software update or indeed material change of any kind to one of my iMacs, I'm suddenly in a situation whereby QuickLook hangs Finder when it tries to provide a preview of any given file type. I'm temporarily turn off preview from the Finder/View Options to allow the Mac to carry on, but would like to solve the underlying problem.

Looking at the logs, I'm guessing this is the underlying problem as it repeats the same error log entry once per second.

10/12/2014 18:10:16.538 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.quicklook[7943]) Service could not initialize: Unable to set current working directory. error=2, path=/tmp: 14B25: xpcproxy + 12907 [1227][1016C726-9ACF-3A24-9C51-A279F5C6B167]: 0x2

10/12/2014 18:14:25.322 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.quicklook.ui.helper[8482]) Service could not initialize: Unable to set current working directory. error=2, path=/tmp: 14B25: xpcproxy + 12907 [1227][1016C726-9ACF-3A24-9C51-A279F5C6B167]: 0x2

I've surfed through various other threads here and tried a few things, without success:

Terminal - "qlmanage -r" - this just hangs after saying "resetting quicklook d"
Remove Preferences plist entries
Found an alias Data folder within Containers/com.apple.quicklook.ui.helper that apparently should be a regular folder - renamed/created accordingly

Would very much appreciate any advice to resolve.

Thanks,

Andy

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)

Posted on Dec 10, 2014 10:18 AM

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Answer 1

alex117

Level 1

5 points

Jan 11, 2015 11:06 AM in response to influentialsoftware

I’m having the same problem. My Console shows the exact same things. A reinstall will fix it but it comes back on it’s own. I also Erased and Installed and manually migrated my User folder back and the issue came back two days later.

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Answer 2

alex117

Level 1

5 points

Jan 11, 2015 11:18 AM in response to influentialsoftware

Alright. I found another post and it fixed everything instantly. As soon as I ran the command in Terminal all icon previews came back. It’s a problem with the /tmp folder. The original post is here. Such a feeling of relief.

Open Terminal and run:

sudo mkdir /private/tmp

followed by

sudo chmod 0777 /private/tmp

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Answer 3

Jan 11, 2015 3:38 PM in response to alex117

The directory existed on my new MBP, but it didn't have any execute rights, so the chmod 0777 fixed it.

Cheers!

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Answer 4

Jan 29, 2015 1:30 AM in response to alex117

This does fix the issue, but it seems to only be temporary. Any ideas on what could be deleting the /private/tmp directory to begin with?

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Answer 5

alex117

Level 1

5 points

Jan 30, 2015 6:51 AM in response to Citricguy

I have no clue what's killing it. I have to run it every couple of days. Sometimes the mkdir and sometimes the chmod to fix permissions.

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Answer 6

ask_jay

Level 1

0 points

May 16, 2015 8:13 AM in response to alex117

THANK YOU!!!!

This fixed my problem on Yosemite 10.10.x and I don't know why the permissions on that folder were the problem. I found the same error in the OP. My issue originally was having the Preview option turned on in Finder, and anytime it would try to open a file in any application for upload or viewing, it would crash the parent application. It was nearly crippling...

This post solved my problem. I don't care if I have to run it every day, it works for fixing the Finder crashes.

✅

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Answer 7

Jul 22, 2016 1:32 PM in response to alex117

I'm on Yosemite 10.10.5

MB Retina 13" early 2015

had this repeating endlessly.

7/22/16 1:16:48.035 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.quicklook) Service only ran for 0 seconds. Pushing respawn out by 1 seconds.

Also, it same problem was blocking Cisco any connect vpn from properly running - complained it couldn't create temp file.

bash-3.2# ls -l /tmp

lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 11 Apr 2 2015 /tmp -> private/tmp

/private/tmp existed so I did

bash-3.2# sudo chmod 0777 /private/tmp

And solved both problems.

I've seen this before a few time over the years. Randomly occurs (months apart) for no apparent update or restart. solved it same way - fixing /private/tmp permissions.

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