Terminal Tips: Check Your Prefs

By C.K. Sample, III

Here's another quick maintenance check you can run from the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/). Launch the Terminal and at the command line type:
 
sudo plutil ~/Library/Preferences/*.plist

This will run plutil, which checks all the preferences inside your User folder for any corruption. The -s handle in the command suppresses any reporting of preferences that check out, so only ones with errors show up. Looks like two files on my system are not parsing correctly due to non UTF-8 characters. That's not that big of a deal, so I'll leave it alone.

However, if you're having an app crash regularly and its preference file shows up in this list, then you should drag the preference file to the Trash. This little corrupt file could be what's causing the crash. A replacement pref file will appear the next time you launch the app. 

Recommended