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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Fixing Mac OS X Leopards “Open With…” command after installing Time Machine.

Time Machine on Mac OS X

After installing Leopard in my Mac Pro, I installed a back-up hard drive to use with Time Machine. After only a couple of weeks, it’s already saved me at least 3 times. When I code in Flash, I tend to make many incremental changes to code and save my file. Sometimes I need to go back to an earlier working version after I’ve gone astray and Time Machine has saved the day. Time Machine has more useful than I ever expected it to be.

One problem I encountered though was that after setting up Time Machine, my “Open with...” command had multiple versions of each program. You find the “Open with...” command by right-clicking a file in the Finder. You will see “Open with...” with all the different applications that the OS thinks can be used to open that particular file. After the Time Machine install, I started to see many copies of each application. For example, I could open an HTML file in around 6 different copies of Safari, or at least this is how it appeared. Since Time Machine mades multiple backups of my hard drive, I assume that is what the “Open with...” command was seeing.

I wanted to fix it though and be sure I wasn’t opening applications from my Time Machine backup. Luckily I found Terminal Commands for Hidden Settings in Leopard, a page of Leopard tips from Mac OSX Tips (macosxtips.co.uk.) It’s well worth visiting. If you just want to fix this problem though, open Terminal and enter the following code (all three lines are actually one line of code) then hit Return. (This works only in Leopard, not Tiger or earlier.)

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/
Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister
-kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

It worked like a charm for me. 

Posted by John on 11/27 at 08:06 AM
GadgetsComputersMacintoshHow To • (0) CommentsPermalink

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