Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Fixing Bad GeekTool 3.0 Scripts

While playing around with GeekTool 3.0, I managed to put in a bad shell command, that caused both GeekTool and System Preferences to become unresponsive.

Since I couldn’t launch the GeekTool preference pane without crashing System Preferences, there was no way for me to delete just the offending shell command. I didn’t want to trash GeekTool and reinstall, since I had eight other scripts (geeklets as they are called in 3.0) that I didn’t want to lose. I needed a way to just delete the one bad shell script.

A Google search turned up nothing, so I poked around the files on my hard drive — and I found the file that contains the GeekTool configuration: org.tynsoe.geeklet.shell.plist in “\\users\username\Library\Preferences”. I double clicked on the file and it opened with Property List Editor. I expanded the keys under the root, and found the key associated with the offending geeklet and deleted it.

I was then able to launch the GeekTool preference pane without a problem.

3 comments:

Pete said...

Thanks for this post - some simple sed syntax error broke one of my shells in the Default group, causing some major headaches. This lead me to exactly what I needed. Much appreciated.

Anonymous said...

I know this is old but just wanted to say THANK YOU! I been trying to fix this for hours and been looking all over the web. Thank you thank you

Anonymous said...

Life saver!!! Thanks!