Avoid a cookie bug in Safari's reset feature

May 20, '04 11:15:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Here's a bug in Safari -- it doesn't actually reset your cookies unless you open the Preferences -> Show Cookies window. Here's a proof ... open Safari and navigate to a few sites that you know stores a cookie (Google, Mac OSX Hints, Yahoo, etc.). Open Terminal and change to your user's Library -> Cookies directory, and do a cat Cookies.plist to see the list of cookies.

Switch to Safari and choose Safari -> Reset Safari... and Reset. Switch back to the Terminal and cat Cookies.plist again. Surprise, surprise they're still there. Now, switch back to Safari and open Preferences -> Security -> Show Cookies. The list is empty. Back in the Terminal, cat Cookies.plist will also show that the list is empty.

[robg adds: This does seem to be a bit of a bug -- I even tried quitting Safari after choosing reset, but the cookies file was still full when I checked it after re-launch. Very strange...]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040518115859752