What happened to my dock (et al)??

April 9, 2008 8:13 PM

I was recently trying to add a "Recents" stack to my dock in Mac OS 10.5.2 using Terminal. I entered a command, pressed enter, and then restarted the dock. From then on, I could not use the dock anymore, nor Dashboard, Spaces, Expose, or the application switcher. I also noticed that my motion sensors do not work anymore. Everything still works on other accounts on my computer, just not on my administrator account. Any ideas about how to fix this?
posted by Return Zero to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Uh, well, what commands did you run?
posted by SpecialK at 8:31 PM on April 9, 2008

Can you log into the Terminal again as that administrator and up-arrow your command history to at least tell us what you entered?
posted by nicwolff at 8:33 PM on April 9, 2008

Restart?
posted by nathan_teske at 8:35 PM on April 9, 2008

is this what you used?
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071101055329470

It worked fine for me, maybe use time machine if nothing else works...
posted by Kifer85 at 9:53 PM on April 9, 2008

You could delete your dock preferences plist file (assuming that Kifer85 is right and what you did is change the preferences file for the dock) and restart.
posted by bcwinters at 5:22 AM on April 10, 2008

If worse comes to absolute, nightmarish worse and something's wrong with the Dock application itself (which indeed would lead to problems with all the other features you mentioned — they're connected to the Dock), you might want to download Pacifist and reinstall just Dock.app from the Leopard install DVD. (Pacifist has repeatedly saved my hide.)
posted by WCityMike at 9:36 AM on April 10, 2008

OK, fixed it by deleting the perferences file. I should have thought of that sooner... lol. Turns out I misread the command using the word "title" instead of "tile" a few times.
posted by Return Zero at 1:16 PM on April 14, 2008

Thank you all for the advice!

and... I just realized I misspelled "preferences" in my previous post.
posted by Return Zero at 1:17 PM on April 14, 2008