Resetting Launch Services....

[nk_e]

Hi all. Just a quick question...mostly for Mike Halloran I guess.

Mike - back in August 2023 you posted what has become a life saving / problem fixing / problem avoiding mac maintence prophylactic terminal script. I run this after a bunch of installs or every couple of months. It has been a life saver. What I would like to know is: Is this still good to use as is given changes and updates in the mac OS?

Reset Launch Services

1. Open Terminal and run these commands. Copy and paste into Terminal.

2. /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -lint -r -f -v -dump -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain network <Enter or Return key>

3. killall Dock <Enter or Return key>

4. sudo mdutil -E / <Enter or Return key> (enter Admin password when prompted, then <Enter or Return key>

5. Restart your Mac

Just wanted to make sure before I run this on my new machine.

And....just thank you. Thank you for all of the mac and system advice you have provided over the years. It has been a huge help for me in many, many ways.

GN

[stubbsonic]

Hi all. Just a quick question...mostly for Mike Halloran I guess.

And....just thank you. Thank you for all of the mac and system advice you have provided over the years. It has been a huge help for me in many, many ways.

Hear hear. Mike Halloran has provided such generous and kind help to so many people on this forum. He's my hero.

[mikehalloran]

I don't know being a hero — I just want things to work.

Edit : I this from Apple recently:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -seed -domain local -domain system -domain user

It is not as thorough as the one I posted earlier.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -lint -r -f -v -dump -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain network

This not only resets Launch Services for the System but for all apps. Other versions reset System only including Onyx.

Symptoms that it should be run:

Mac or Apps consistently take too long to boot (my first iMac Pro was taking 25 minutes to boot anter a .kxt conflict was resolved)

Mac or Apps consistently take too long to quit or shut down (same and DP 9.51)

Mac or Apps do not shut down unless Force-Quit (how I discovered it after a Sierra update on my 2010 iMac).

[mikehalloran]

A few days ago, I was setting up an ancient 1st gen WD My Cloud Mirror with a couple of 6TB Reds running RAID 0 to create a 12TB Time Machine backup. All of my Macs have more than one available and the old drive on this one was nearly full.

Anyway, one of my 2012 MBPs has nearly 2TB on it. With its slow 100 Mbps Ethernet combined with this slow NAS box, I know it's going to take 3–4 days to complete its first backup. No problem... except that, as its chugging along, the fan keeps coming on, often for a half hour at a time and I was getting annoyed—TM backups shouldn't make anything run hot and I had replaced the mechanical HDD years ago with a SATA III SSD.

Perhaps something's causing a memory leak (these max out at 16GB) but I don't want to make this take longer so I open Terminal and run sudo purge to clear any free RAM. No change.

I realize that I had never reset the launch services since I set this up so I ran the command and figured that I would reboot, start TM over etc. — doesn't take that long as TM eventually picks up where it left off. Well, after running the command and hitting the Return key, the fan shut down immediately and stayed quiet till the backup completed a couple days later. I didn't bother with the rest of the sequence or reboot.

Who knew? Again, it was this one:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -lint -r -f -v -dump -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain network <Enter or Return key>

The rest of the sequence that I didn't post above and never ran on my MBP is as follows:

killall Dock <Enter or Return key>
mdutil -E / <Enter or Return key>
Restart your Mac

[stubbsonic]

Did you pause the back up? Or did you just raw-dog it while the backup was running? If so, that's impressive-- that it was kind of kept separate from whatever the running process was. Glad you didn't have to start over!

[mikehalloran]

Did you pause the back up? Or did you just raw-dog it while the backup was running? If so, that's impressive-- that it was kind of kept separate from whatever the running process was. Glad you didn't have to start over!

Nope, I didn't pause. I figured that the command wouldn't 'take' till I rebooted. When the fan shut down and I saw that TM was still backing up, I thought, Well, ain't touching that… and let it finish.

Since I posted that a couple hours ago, my other 2012 MBP came back from repair (I'd dumped a fresh cup of coffee into it a couple weeks ago). It's being backed up into that same Time Capsule but I ran the command first this time — fan is quiet.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't have bothered with the repair—after all, I have two, right? Well, my homeless brother accidently signed me up for a $25mo Asurion extended warranty on home electronics when he was in an AT&T store in February (I pay his phone bill). Cancelling it was on my to-do list but I hadn't done that yet so I called to see if this old laptop was covered. One $99 deductible later — now it works.

[stubbsonic]

One $99 deductible later — now it works.