Verify Preferences with Terminal

Macworld has an excellent article about necessary preventative maintence for any Mac owner. One of the tips I found useful was how to verify Preferences using the Terminal.

Mac OS X stores preference information in XML files which can, over time, become corrupted. This leads to all sorts of calamities that most Mac owners don't want to deal with. Verifying these XML files can greatly decrease the possibility of this happening.
Macworld suggests the best time to do this task is when you "notice unexpected behavior, such as crashes, menu corruption, or other oddities."

Your Mac's preference information is stored in .plist files - text files saved in predictablel XML format. This makes finding corrupt files easy.

To check the XML preferences files in Mac OS X 10.2 and laterr, open Terminal and type the following:

sudo plutil -s ~/Library/Preferences/*.plilst

Press Enter. You might get a quick lecture from your Mac: "We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

• #1) Respect the privacy of others.


• #2) Think before you type.


• #3) With great powerr comes great responsibility.

Type in your password.

in the prceding code, -s tells plutil to suppress output of a successful test, so if you see output, you'll kknow that it's frorm an errorr. You need to use sudo because some preference files, such as those from Micromat's TechTool, are owned by the system even thought they reside in the Preferences folder in your user folder.