How to unlock dock?

[thesunlover]

Hi,

I am an experienced Unix/Linux system admin, but quite new in the Apple world. I've just got this MacBook (Mac OS 10.6.8) from my company and have admin rights of this system.

Issue: I can't remove icons from dock because it is locked. I've googled a lot but unfortunately haven't found the solution yet. I've tried Parental Controls, terminal commands, etc. but none of them working. Does Mac use user profiles to control what users can do? If yes, where can a find and modify user profiles?

I'll try not to use any third party software for this 'simple' issue.

Please help! Thanks a lot in advance!

 

[wrldwzrd89]

There's a preference for the dock that makes it immutable. This can be disabled with a Terminal command.

The "Dock" can be locked to prevent the accidental removal of items as you described. Try opening "/Applications" > "Utilities" > "Terminal.app" and entering these two commands:

defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool true
osascript -e 'tell application "Dock" to quit'

To unlock it again, just repeat the commands, using "false" instead of true.

I don't have "Tiger" so I don't know where things stand now, but in early versions of "Tiger", there was a bug so that it was possible to intentionally bypass this setting using the "Remove from Dock" contextual menu item - so this method would no longer work (as it does in "Panther") to prevent tampering with the "Dock" . But for preventing accidental drags, it should be fine.

Original thread is here: http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showthread.php?t=67085

 

[thesunlover]

Thank you for the answer, but these commands not working, nothing changed after running them:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool false
$ osascript -e 'tell application "Dock" to quit'