SMC update doesn't launch on case-sensitive file system: SOLUTION

[chris11]

Hi,

MBA late 2008, 10.5.6.

I've just got stuck in an infinite loop with Software Updates: it kept on
showing - and I kept on dl and installing - "MacBook Air SMC Firmware
Update 1.1" again and again. The update never launched, though.

I found this very annoying and investigated it. A system.log entry
gave it away:

com.apple.launchd[71] (com.apple.updater.macbookair.smc.110.autolaunch[117]): posix_spawnp("/Applications/Utilities/MacBook Air SMC Firmware Update.app/Contents/MacOS/MacBook Air SMC Firmware Update", ...): No such file or directory

Turns out the path on disk is like the above but with "AIR" twice instead
of "Air". I'm using a *case-sensitive* HFS+ file system, so for
me "AIR" is a different path than "Air", hence the problem.

My work around was to adding symbolic links from Terminal:

cd /Applications/Utilities/
ln -s "MacBook AIR SMC Firmware Update.app" "MacBook Air SMC Firmware Update.app"
cd "MacBook Air SMC Firmware Update.app/Contents/MacOS"
ln -s "MacBook AIR SMC Firmware Update" "MacBook Air SMC Firmware Update"

after rebooting the firmware update launched Ok. I've broken out of
the infinite loop 🙂

Mmm.. maybe choosing to have my HFS+ "case-sensitive" was not a
good idea after all?! On the other hand I can't believe Apple QA doesn't
have a single box with a case-sensitive file system that could have caught
this regression... 😕

Bye,
Chris.