Launch Services Clutter
Posted November 28th, 2012 @ 04:18pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Why does this happen?As you can see, I'm trying to open an image via the contextual menu. I'd like to open it in Pixelmator, but instead of one choice, I'm given a choice of five.
This makes no sense.
I have one hard disk (the main one) with a copy of Pixelmator. That hard disk is backed up twice to connected drives - once to a Time Machine drive, and again nightly to another drive via SuperDuper for a bootable backup (and quicker recoveries than is available via Time Machine).
Though it keeps removing itself from the Spotlight exclusion list, I keep adding the latter drive to it, and both of the backup drives are excluded from Time Machine (one for obvious reasons - it IS the TM backup drive).
So, short of clearing the entire launch services cache and restarting, why does this keep happening? I don't want to launch a version of Pixelmator off another drive.
Donate Life
Posted 30 Nov 2012 at 3:17am #
I just looked and I also have 5 instances of Pixelmator, 5 instances of Skitch, 5 instances of DEVONthink Pro, and 5 instances of Xcode on my Open With menu. But the only copies of Pixelmator are in /Applications and Time Machine.
All the items seem to execute the copy in /Applications.
I think your extra disks are off the hook. I can't see any pattern to the bug though.
Running "/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user" does seem to fix it without needing a restart.
Posted 30 Nov 2012 at 1:33pm #
Thanks Chris. I added that command to run nightly via cron. And to an alias in my shell ("flushLSCache").
Thanks for sparing me having to find that. I suppose my post was more about wondering why Mac OS X (10.8.2 but every version I've known) seems to get so screwy with its launch services.
I once had windows auto-restored and had two icons for QuickTime player in my dock. Clicking them produced the same results, and command-clicking them both showed me the app in /Applications on my boot-up volume. Weird. 😛