Check for extraneous plist files in 10.2

Sep 19, '02 09:18:56AM

Contributed by: greggo

For every application I would run in Mac OS X 10.2, the system would take the name of the application (example, untitled.plist for an untitled AppleScript that was saved and run as an application) and save it as a .plist file in my ~/Library/Preferences/ directory. I started noticing them when I was creating AppleScript applications; they would show up with the name of the application I saved them as. When I opened them in TextEdit they would always have the same text in them:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST
1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>dv com.apple.soundmgr._DV Sound Output Settings</key>
<data>
fQAAAA==
</data>
</dict>
</plist>
Although each file was small in size (285 bytes, or a 4KB block for each file) the System Bloat was starting to add up. I have deleted 82 of these files without any problems. It appears that Apple was aware of this issue and has fixed it in Mac OS X 10.2.1, as the .plist files are not being created after I installed the updater.

So you may want to check your ~/Library/Preferences directory to see if you have a few of the extra .plist files.

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