That Summabitch Document Controller Again

Does the acronym stand for 'hysterical file system'?

Get It Try It

Plodding along, tweaking Info.plist files. All goes well except for one. The system refuses to save the changes.

Actually it's not the system per se - it's the Cocoa document controller. The Cocoa document controller (aka NSDocumentController) refuses.

Summabitch.

Is anything wrong with the file? It's being edited by PlistEdit, a property list editor. PlistEdit doesn't allow syntactical errors, as it checks each file for syntactical errors before attempting to save it.

Did some Unicode (UTF-16) or some non-UTF-8 sneak in there? Not likely.

And duplicating the file and attempting to save the duplicate works well enough.

Is there something wrong with the file permissions? The file's marked with 0600 so it should be alright. There are no additional flags on the file and the enclosing directory can be modified and as this is 10.5 that's important because 10.5 never saves files - it bloody deletes them first and then creates them again.

[Knock on wood. WTG, Bertie.]

So how about moving the file to a new location?

Nope.

How about rebooting and holding down ⌘S and then running /sbin/fsck -fy?

Yep, there's something wrong with this impervious file system but nope, it doesn't help the file what don't fancy being saved.

At this point there's only one thing left. And it seems improbable because who would have ever done what's needed to get the file in this sorry condition?

Whatever. Test it and see. The file's inode is 630520. Put that on the find pasteboard right now. Now move to root in Terminal and put in the following command.

sudo chmod 777 "\342\220\200\342\220\200\342\220\200\342\220\200HFS+ Private Data"

Then drill down with GDE. Goodness. It's true.



The computing world eagerly awaits the first release of a real file system from Apple Inc.