5

Yesterday I noticed that I could no longer ⌘ + TAB, minimize/maximize windows and that the Dock was missing. I've tried numerous things to resolve it:

  • rebooting
  • reseting PRAM
  • killing Dock with killall -KILL Dock

That last one should restart the process, but it didn't appear to initially:

$ killall -KILL Dock
No matching processes belonging to you were found
$ ps -ef|grep -i Dock
  501  2145   826   0  7:50AM ttys000    0:00.00 grep -i Dock

I opened up the Activity Monitor and noticed that it was repeatedly trying to restart the process:

When I tried to restart it manually I noticed that a NSInvalidArgumentException was being thrown:

$ /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock
2015-01-27 07:30:34.441 Dock[1126:38505] -[__NSCFNumber stringByExpandingTildeInPath]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x537
2015-01-27 07:30:34.442 Dock[1126:38505] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[__NSCFNumber stringByExpandingTildeInPath]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x537'
*** First throw call stack:
(
  0   CoreFoundation                      0x00007fff8d6ec64c __exceptionPreprocess + 172
  1   libobjc.A.dylib                     0x00007fff819096de objc_exception_throw + 43
  2   CoreFoundation                      0x00007fff8d6ef6bd -[NSObject(NSObject) doesNotRecognizeSelector:] + 205
  3   CoreFoundation                      0x00007fff8d636a84 ___forwarding___ + 1028
  4   CoreFoundation                      0x00007fff8d6365f8 _CF_forwarding_prep_0 + 120
  5   Dock                                0x000000010907feca Dock + 61130
  6   Dock                                0x000000010907fd75 Dock + 60789
  7   Dock                                0x000000010907f780 Dock + 59264
  8   Dock                                0x000000010907cc70 Dock + 48240
  9   Dock                                0x000000010907be54 Dock + 44628
  10  Dock                                0x000000010907696c Dock + 22892
  11  libdyld.dylib                       0x00007fff837e95c9 start + 1
)
libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
Abort trap: 6

Can anyone offer any suggestions? I miss my dock and my keyboard shortcuts...

Improve this question
6
  • I guess you could try kill -9?
    – DisplayName
    Commented Jan 27, 2015 at 16:52
  • Safe mode? single user mode? Permissions repair?
    – Ruskes
    Commented Jan 27, 2015 at 16:52
  • Thanks for the pointers. Still no dice with safe/single user/verbose mode or permissions repair.
    – Lee Reilly
    Commented Jan 28, 2015 at 16:45
  • Remove preference files related to the Dock?
    – Ashley
    Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 13:36
  • Thanks, Ashley. I tried removing com.apple.dock* and restarting. Still have the same problem :(
    – Lee Reilly
    Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 22:08

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

I got the same problem and fixed it by removing desktoppicture.db:

rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/desktoppicture.db

Then Dock started automatically.

Improve this answer
3
  • Deleting most of the Dock preference files in ~/Library/Preferences is also worth a shot.
    – benwiggy
    Commented Jul 2, 2019 at 20:14
  • @benwiggy I did that also, but it didn't help on its own at least
    – felixbade
    Commented Jul 2, 2019 at 20:27
  • 1
    @felixbade Im sorry if this is weird but I love you so much!!! Thank you my computer has been broken all week and this fixed it
    – Seaver Olson
    Commented Jan 26, 2021 at 19:51

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