Odd Mountain Lion Crashing Bug Brings Down Nearly Any App

[mrsir2009]

Time to sabotage people’s iMessage!

[OzyOly]

Originally Posted by mrsir2009

Time to sabotage people’s iMessage!

My friend already did that, I had to go find my history and delete it before messages would load again.

[gnasher729]

Originally Posted by zioxide

typing file:/// causes it to crash?

here's an idea: don't type file:///

Re-read this thread. file:/// doesn't crash anything.

[SockRolid]

Originally Posted by MacRumors

... it is related to Apple's Data Detectors feature for automatically recognizing dates, locations and other information in text ...

The bad news: It's serious and it's pervasive. Data Detectors code is widely used in OS X.

The good news: Should be simple to fix and test. Just a tweak to the parser.

The great news: It's terribly obscure. Very few Mac users ever type File://<anything>. Seriously.

[castlema]

I tried entering it into Safari and nothing happened. Very odd.

[bwolfcale]

Crashed my Safari. I couldn't not try it!

[iMacFarlane]

Originally Posted by Jack Delgado

I'm going to go ahead and guess that this will affect 0.00001% of all humans on this earth. Just my guess though.

706 people? What if they all manage to get tickets to WWDC 2013? It could be . . . tense.

[voyagerd]

Apparently sending File:/// to someone using Messages on Mac OS causes Messages to crash whenever they try to open it again.

[BC2009]

Been using Mountain Lion since it was released and I had never hit this. I suppose that typing "File:" followed by "//" is not a common thing for me (at least not in that case -- I would use "file://").

Strange defect though.

[Dr McKay]

Originally Posted by Fresh Pie

Ugh. I just tried to contact an Apple representative about this, and as soon as I described the problem, they hung up on me. This bug goes deep, man.

Oh the irony if you had and they typed File:/// into their fault recording program and it crashed.

[phillipduran]

Originally Posted by azentropy

Not a bug, it is a feature!

Beat me to it!

Strangely, Command Q does the same thing.

I hope we get a fix soon.

[AidenShaw]

Originally Posted by dearfriendx

Yeah, this is SO utterly embarrassing. Most of the world is required to type 'file:/*' into most apps these days. Their stock is going to plummet

Actually, it is down to $445....

[reel2reel]

Originally Posted by the8thark

I have to agree. I haven't typed that in anything for a very long time. Sure this is a bad bug. But it's not going to hassle the average user. As they simply don't do this.

I'm an average user and I've typed it three times today already. It's fun.

[thedoctor]

Originally Posted by jpetticrew

Didn't crash my terminal.

cmd-O and then type File:///

boom

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Originally Posted by thedoctor

cmd-O and then type File:///

Just found that the crash can be stopped by turning off the DataDetectors use in individual applications, e.g. ..

defaults write com.apple.terminal DisableDataDetectors YES

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Originally Posted by zioxide

typing file:/// causes it to crash?

here's an idea: don't type file:///

Nope ... don't type ... File:///

[hrishidev]

Originally Posted by SockRolid

The great news: It's terribly obscure. Very few Mac users ever type File://<anything>. Seriously.

Absolutely .....

[Lancer]

Read about this a few days ago, tried it on an older G5 running Leopard no issues. Just got my new 27" and it crashed TextEdit.

This is a HUGE oversight!

Go Apple

[Smacky]

File//gate

[voyagerd]

Originally Posted by OzyOly

My friend already did that, I had to go find my history and delete it before messages would load again.

Deleting this history isn't working...

I deleted these:
~/Library/Messages
~/Libary/Caches/com.apple.messages
~/Library/Saved Application States/com.apple.ichat

What should I try next?

[Roessnakhan]

Originally Posted by voyagerd

Deleting this history isn't working...

I deleted these:
~/Library/Messages
~/Libary/Caches/com.apple.messages
~/Library/Saved Application States/com.apple.ichat

What should I try next?

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ichat, com.apple.imessage.bag

And reboot after you empty the trash.

[bekiil]

I guess this delays 10.8.3 another 14 days or more.

[Peace]

Originally Posted by Roessnakhan

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ichat, com.apple.imessage.bag

And reboot after you empty the trash.

Re-booting in itself fixes it until you do it again.

This bug is in the root of the kernel. Syntax..

[voyagerd]

Originally Posted by Roessnakhan

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ichat, com.apple.imessage.bag

And reboot after you empty the trash.

Looks like that worked. Thanks! I didn't really want to make the person delete their prefs so that was my last resort.

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Originally Posted by Peace

Re-booting in itself fixes it until you do it again.

This bug is in the root of the kernel. Syntax..

For some reason deleting all those other things and rebooting didn't help on my friend's comp. Messages still crashed.

[oliversl]

Wow, it do crashes Mail.app, the important thing is that the string is case sensitive

Launch Mail.app, compose new email, click on the body, type that string which is listed above (can't type it here )

[Peace]

Originally Posted by voyagerd

Looks like that worked. Thanks! I didn't really want to make the person delete their prefs so that was my last resort.

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For some reason deleting all those other things and rebooting didn't help on my friend's comp. Messages still crashed.

If you have iCloud synching go to either the iPad or the iPhone and delete the message with the error. Then it should propagate to the Mac and the message with the error will be gone.

[ndmx52]

Is it just typing the 'file: ///' that is really causing this? I've had finder, Mail, and Safari cash like crazy on 10.8.2.