I get pretty tired of troubleshooting, so I'm posting this to help those who may be experiencing this bug from wasting their time troubleshooting this.
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/02/04/odd ... y-any-app/
One of the fastest-spreading stories of the weekend has been a strange OS X Mountain Lion bug that can crash almost any Mac app running any version of OS X 10.8, reported on Open Radar.
The initial bug report stated that typing 'File:///' (without the quotes) into almost any app causes the app to crash.
Follow-up testing has shown that the final character needn't be a forward-slash, with almost any character after 'File://' triggering the bug. The issue is also speed-dependent: leaving a brief pause between typing // and the next character will prevent the crash from occurring.
More embarrassingly still for Apple, filing a crash report causes both Crash Reporter and the Console apps to crash. The Console crash can only be cured by running a terminal command:
sudo sed -i -e 's@File:///@F i l e : / / /@g' /var/log/system.log
The Next Web has a detailed analysis of the issue, noting that it is related to Apple's Data Detectors feature for automatically recognizing dates, locations and other information in text for addition to Address Book or Calendar entries.
While it is rather surprising that the issue took so long to receive publicity, Apple is now likely to include a fix for the problem sooner rather than later. It is, however, unknown whether Apple will squeeze a fix into the upcoming OS X 10.8.3 that has been in developer testing for over two months.
On a related note, Oracle just released a Java patch:
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/02/01/ora ... n-on-os-x/
http://java.com/en/download/apple.jsp
Mountain Lion bug - posted to save you from troubleshooting
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Re: Mountain Lion bug - posted to save you from troubleshooting
Phew! Good thing I have no idea why I'd be typing "File:///"!
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Re: Mountain Lion bug - posted to save you from troubleshooting
+1 file:// ok but 3 slashes, what's the use?
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Re: Mountain Lion bug - posted to save you from troubleshooting
Can you enlighten me to the use either way?
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Re: Mountain Lion bug - posted to save you from troubleshooting
file:// is the start of a URL (akin to http://). about the only time most people would see it is if an application you use loads it's help files from your local drive into a web browser.aioffermann wrote:Can you enlighten me to the use either way?
file:/// refers to the root (top) directory on your local drive.
almost nobody ever needs to type it. it's somewhat of an obscure bug since it only happens if you capitalise the 'f", which isn't usually the way you'd type it...