Verify that preferences files are not corrupt

You can normally find corrupt preferences files on your Mac by using the “plutil” command line tool in your Mac’s Terminal. However, understandably some of you might not feel that comfortable mucking around with the Terminal. Thankfully, Preferential Treatment makes this tool accessible to anyone by offering it in a straightforward interface.

Browsing for corrupt preferences files is very easy. We liked how the application parsed results, revealing the location and the specific problem for each file. Once you’ve found suspect files the best solution is to trash them, which you can do straight from Preferential Treatment’s interface. Just to be on the safe side, we also suggest uninstalling the related applications and re-installing a fresh copy. You should also save a report of your scan, once again via Preferential Treatment.

Although Preferential Treatment lacks readme files, it’s a great application to have, which makes finding corrupted preference files accessible to anyone.

Building on a discussion at www.macintouch.com, this application will check your preference files (both in your user’s preference folder and the system’s preference folder) for corruption by using the “plutil” command line tool. If it finds suspect files, it will list the files and allow you to reveal them in the Finder or move them to the trash. You may also double-click on a file in the found files table to open it in the application of your choice (you can designate the default application from the preferences). There is also an option to save the results of a scan to a text file. (Note: if you trash a file before saving a report, the report will not include information on the file you moved to the trash.)

“Preferential Treatment” is basically a GUI wrapped around the “plutil” command line tool provided by Apple, Inc. since Mac OS X 10.2 (see “man plutil” in the Terminal). “plutil” just checks to see if .plist files are valid XML. This application is no panacea but it does help to fix blatantly corrupt preference files.