The accumulation of these temporary preference files may have been corrected in Lion, but if you are running Snow Leopard or Leopard, then you will likely see them appear after a while of using your system. The temporary file should be deleted automatically, but sometimes odd problems may result in them sticking around. In OS X 10.6 or earlier, if you look in the preferences folder you may see a number of property list files with a string of eight characters after their names, such as the following:Īll of the files with eight-character strings appended to their names will be 0KB in size, and are the temporary files that were used for a specific preference saving instance. To combat this, the system creates a temporary file to save the new settings, and when the file is properly saved, it then replaces the old file with the new one.
For instance, if you are saving settings for a program and the system suddenly loses power, then the preferences file being written to may get corrupted and won't open properly when the system is restarted, which would result in all your settings being lost.
Part of the way the system manages preferences files is a protection method for preventing corruption from happening if an error occurs when the system is writing preference files. This makes it easier for the programmer to use the plist format, and also allows preferences to be standardized on the system instead of having numerous odd formats in your library folder from every developer out there.
What is a plist file code#
Regardless of these details, when a program writes settings to a plist file it uses Apple's standardized methods for doing so, by referencing central plist management commands and routines instead of using its own code for managing the preferences file format. The files can either be text files which will open readily in any text editor, or can be encoded in a binary format to make handling them more efficient. Preferences files in OS X are stored in Apple's plist format, which is an XML file type that contains a specific set of tags and organization for application settings. Apple may have corrected the accumulation of these in Lion, but they will appear in Snow Leopard and Leopard if you are running those operating systems. iTunes is notorious for creating a number of temporary preference files.
In addition to Chris' question, a number of other MacFixIt readers have asked about the accumulation of empty preference files in past versions of OS X, and have wondered what they are and whether it is safe to remove them. If I want to copy the prefs of a given app to another volume manually, should I copy just the normal plist file (letting the plus.lockfile to be created there automatically), or should I copy both? MacFixIt reader "Chris" wrote in, asking:Ĭan you please provide an explanation of the new plist.lockfile files in the Preferences folders in Lion? They seem to be created once the respective app was launched the first time. This procedure is fairly straightforward, but when browsing through your preferences folder you may see a few unexpected file types, including ones with strings of characters appended to the ends of them and in Lion a new "lockfile" type.
What is a plist file software#
PLIST file with the Notepad++, Microsoft Notepad, Smithsoft Plistinator programs on Windows, Apple Xcode, Fat Cat PlistEdit Pro, PrefEdit, Night Productions Pref Setter, Smithsoft Plistinator programs on Mac and Smithsoft Plistinator software on Linux.When troubleshooting your system, or when attempting to mirror settings from one system to another, you may end up browsing through your user library, and specifically through the Preferences folder within it to copy preferences files for your applications.
What is a plist file how to#
In this article you have learned how to open the. You might be trying to open the wrong file, please recheck if you are trying to open the right file extension again. There are many similar file extensions that look like the. PLIST file, it might be because you are trying to open the wrong one. That’s all, now you have opened your file on Linux. In the fourth step, after clicking “Open with”, you should see the Smithsoft Plistinator software that you have downloaded. Step 4: Open the file choosing the softwareĤ.
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