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john asks: QuestionAlright, I know this is a low level request, but in the Finder’s contextual menu, when you ctrl+click (read: right click) on something, there is an “Open with …” menu item. Sometimes, for a reason I don’t completely understand, this becomes full of the same program several times. How can I manually edit this list to make sure “Camino” doesn’t appear 4 times? Thanks in adv. AnswerThe Launch Services database has become confused and needs to be reset. This is rather like rebuilding the desktop in Mac OS 9 and before, but it needs to be done much more rarely and is a bit more complicated. cd /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/ ./lsregister -kill -domain local -domain system -domain user You can pass it the -r flag to get a running commentary, but that’s superfluous. What it’s going to do is destroy the current database and then search the three pre-defined domains for programs to register and add them to the database. Logout and back in and the menu should work as expected. This has been discussed on this site a couple of times before:
About Adam Knight
 Author Biography Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c. In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Switchblade) and has a few other toys coming out soon. Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed]. |
Thanks! I’ve been having this problem too with a few applications, very useful post!
this is probably a different issue, but I see the same thing when my backup drive is mounted (since it contains all the same apps as my boot drive, of course)
No, its the same problem. I think the clone drive causes the list to duplicate.
It will show the programs on any disk. If there are two versions of a program, it will show both and have a version after each.
Try having two major versions of the system mounted at once and you’ll see this behavior.
Of course, if you have two copies of the exact same program available, then it might list it twice as well, though I’d hope it wouldn’t.
It seems that running this command has caused several document icons to become mis-associated… For example, the .saver icons now have Xcode’s header file icon on them, along with several others that I’ve noticed. This is very strange because they will open with the correct applications. Perhaps a reboot will fix this problem, but I’m running stuff in the background that needs to stay up for a while… any ideas?
Got a chance to restart the computer and indeed this seems to have fixed the problem.
I tried this with no success. I got the response:
-bash: lsregister: command not found
What am I missing?
The
cdcommand issued right before it and the./prefix.I tried this command and got the error:
-bash: cd: /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/
./lsregister: No such file of directory
any suggestions?
the ./lsregister is a command, not part of the path. Issue the cd command as shown. Then issue the ./lsregister command as shown
I have run this command and it fixes the problem temporarily, but after a day or two I’m back to seeing triplicates in my “Open With…” menu. Any ideas?
Thanks, that fixed it.
On my system (10.5.4), the path to lsregister is different:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/