"File ... is busy. Skipping for now." for all the files

Hazel has stopped working. None of the rules for any of the folders are working anymore. Trying to run rules manually doesn't work either.

After exporting the rules, removing folders, putting them back, and importing the rules, nothing has changed.

I also repaired permissions.

On the logs, it says the same thing for anything it watches:
2012-10-13 21:39:17.897 hazelfolderwatch[69672] File ... is busy. Skipping for now.

A lot of those are about ".DS_Store", and the rest are about the files Hazel is supposed to run rules for and move.

Is it possible for all the files to be erroneously declared busy by the system? Or is it about Hazel? What may have caused this? What can be done to fix this?

I'm running Hazel 2.3.10 (v721) on Mac OS X 10.8.2.

Have you logged in and back out?

Have you stopped and restarted Hazel in the Information panel?

a_freyer wrote:Have you logged in and back out?

Have you stopped and restarted Hazel in the Information panel?

Yes. Stopping and restarting Hazel didn't work.

However... I've found the culprit; a hidden Hazel window, only appeared during shut down, showing me the related files and folders for something I trashed.

After turning the mac on again, Hazel immediately started working. Except for one image file in the downloads folder. It didn't even show it on the preview list as matched. An hour later, it moved the file.

Sounds like there was a fluke with the window ordering that caused the files to be held by a listing window that you couldn't see. Here's hoping the situation doesn't appear again.

The hidden trash list window is an example of a typical problem in Mac OS X. But once one suspects it, it can be found. So it will be the first thing I'll look for if this happens again.

The image that wasn't marked as "matched" when previewed inside Hazel pref pane after restarting the system, on the other hand, is still puzzling me. It's good that it has fixed itself after an hour, but this type of thing could drive one mad if it happened during the setup check of a new rule.

If it isn't matching in the preview then you need to look at that file and your rules more closely. It seems you are running version 2 so you don't have the new feature where you can view all the file's fields so you'll need to go into Finder or use the commandline to dump the metadata (and even then, it will be missing Hazel-specific fields).

Mr_Noodle wrote:If it isn't matching in the preview then you need to look at that file and your rules more closely. It seems you are running version 2 so you don't have the new feature where you can view all the file's fields so you'll need to go into Finder or use the commandline to dump the metadata (and even then, it will be missing Hazel-specific fields).

The rule was simply "if kind is image, move to folder2", which I was using for a very long time without any problems. And it didn't show the one image that was in folder1, as matched, on the preview list. After an hour, it moved that image to folder2 though.

Do you think it's related to the lack of the new feature you mentioned?

The new feature is only in the UI to help you diagnose this. This may be an issue with OS X. Recent OS X patches have resulted in Spotlight being slow. If the image is not matching in the preview, then that is probably the case. There was a supplemental update for 10.7.5 which fixed this. 10.8.2 had a supplemental update as well so I suggest trying that and seeing if that clears things up.