Hi All,
Since Finder is running all the time, is there a special technique to deleting its plists file? (I want to start over.) Don't suppose there is a way to actually exit Finder?
Many thanks,
-T
Mac OS X (10.7.5)
I see the machine tomorrow.
I take it OSx does not have <ctrl><alt><f2 & f1> like Linux does. (Allow for an alternate command line separate from the regular log in so you can do maintenance.)
You know it would be nice if I could boot my Fedora Live USB stick, but Apple has gone to great lengths to keep me from doing that. Not even M$ puts you in that kind of a straight jacket.
I am thinking of opening a command terminal, look up Finder's process ID, and doing a "kill -9 finder_pid; rm finders.plists". Maybe I will be able to delete the plists before Finder starts back up.
Thank you for the help.
That is for programs that are not running. When exit a running program, it writes the same garbage back to the plists file. That is why I asked if there was a special technique to erasing Finder's plists as it was still running and would just write the same trash back to the plists file and nothing would be reset.
To accomplish what you are requesting, you need to boot to an alternate source of software. A copy of Mac OS X on another drive would be the most convenient.
If you use Recovery HD, the Utilities there include Terminal, so you could track down that file and delete it through Terminal.
You could also try deleting the file, then force-Quit Finder (it immediately re-launches) and see if that works.
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What problem are you trying to solve? Maybe there is a different way to approach it.
for an alternate command line separate from the regular log in so you can do maintenance.
That would be invoking Terminal while Mac OS X is running.
But as you describe the problem, 'an alternate window while the main system is running' does not meet your criterion of having Finder NOT running.
Using Recovery does meet that test, because it is its own primitive Boot partition and uses nothing from the main system partition.
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This might be another way to proceed:
Another interesting feature of Mac OS X and older Mac OS systems is that once files are opened, they are referred to by File Numbers, not by Directory locations. You used this in Mac OS to "set aside" System Extensions (or .plist files) by hiding them inside another folder or moving them to the desktop, where they continued to work perfectly UNTIL the System/Application was restarted. At that point it did a new Directory lookup, and the replacement file (or no file) was used instead.
Thank you. I will give it a try.
The main problem is that I am turning off the hide extension feature and reboot turn it back on. The customer thinks he has several of the same file: config.pls, config.000, config.some_date. And he doesn't like my explanation that they are really different files.
Finder also does not keep the setting to start at the root directory.
How do you delete finder's plists file?
