[Solved] Hazel stuck — not loading rules

Mr_Noodle wrote:There is no Hazel folder under Application Support? That indicates a permissions issue. Are you able to create folders there without being prompted for a password?

OK, found the issue! Very strange. There was an alias there, called Hazel, that was referencing itself! That probably prevented Hazel from creating a folder with the same name. No idea how it appeared there. I thought Mackup might be the culprit, but I couldn’t find any trace of Hazel in the folders created by Mackup in the iCloud-folder.

Anyway, I deleted the mysterious alias and it seems to work now. Strange. Thank you for your help and have a nice day!

Ah, Mackup has been the cause of issues before. I think it's important to bring that up whenever reporting problems with apps.

Unfortunately, the issue is back (I hadn’t checked in the meantime), although I’ve uninstalled Mackup. It’s extremely annoying. I uninstalled everything several times, tried multiple versions of Hazel, deleted all the Hazel-related folders in the library, and nothing seems to work. I really hope you can help. I’m happy to provide additional input for debugging.

Can you report back with the answers to my questions the first time this happened?

Mr_Noodle wrote:There is no Hazel folder under Application Support? That indicates a permissions issue. Are you able to create folders there without being prompted for a password?

Thank you for your answer. There is a Hazel folder under Application Support now, in there are five files, and I can create folders and files in there.

The files are: one ending in .hazelrules, one in .hazellocalrulesdb, one license, and two starting with trash- and ending with .hazeldb.

And you are getting the exact same problems with a message about rules not loading? And importing rules behaves as you originally mentioned?

Mr_Noodle wrote:And you are getting the exact same problems with a message about rules not loading? And importing rules behaves as you originally mentioned?

Yes, the symptoms look unchanged. At every startup, the question about the trial, regardless of the license. The rules don’t save and don’t execute. The impossibility to stop Hazel properly. I can only stop it through the Activity Monitor, and sometimes only by deleting the app and then stopping all the Hazel-related programs in the Activity Monitor.

In the background, the only main thing that changed is that I’m using macOS Sequoia 15.2 now.

Can you enter the following in Terminal and post the output?

Code: Select all: ls -ld ~/Library/Application\ Support/Hazel

and

Code: Select all: ls -l ~/Library/Application\ Support/Hazel

Thank you for your help!

Here we are:

Code: Select all: f@123 ~ % ls -ld ~/Library/Application\ Support/Hazel drwxr-xr-x@ 9 f staff 288 13 Dez 15:35 /Users/f/Library/Application Support/Hazel f@123 ~ % ls -l ~/Library/Application\ Support/Hazel total 56 -rw-r--r--@ 1 f staff 474 12 Dez 18:50 ***.hazellocalrulesdb -rw-r--r--@ 1 f staff 488 12 Dez 18:50 ***.hazelrules -rw-------@ 1 f staff 667 12 Dez 18:51 license -rw-r--r--@ 1 f staff 10002 13 Dez 15:35 trash-***-.Trash.hazeldb -rw-r--r--@ 1 f staff 3278 12 Dez 18:51 trash-***-iCloud.hazeldb

I replaced the numbers by ***, not knowing if there was anything confidential about them.

Another precision: this is the situation where Hazel is uninstalled, because sometimes I couldn’t manage to close it without uninstalling first.

I'm not quite understanding your last point. Can you elaborate?

Mr_Noodle wrote:I'm not quite understanding your last point. Can you elaborate?

This refers to what I have written in previous posts:

The impossibility to stop Hazel properly. I can only stop it through the Activity Monitor, and sometimes only by deleting the app and then stopping all the Hazel-related programs in the Activity Monitor.

What I found out, is that the only way of force closing Hazel without it being relaunched automatically is to delete the program, and then force closing.

Since I can’t get Hazel to stop through it’s interface or the Activity Monitor, I delete it from the programs, and then I can close all the apps through the Activity Monitor. Otherwise, I can’t close them, or they get immediately restarted, I’m not sure.

And since my last deletion of Hazel, I haven’t installed it again, the state of the files that I showed you through the ls commands is the one with Hazel uninstalled, but the config files still being there (which is normal I suppose). I don’t think it makes any difference to have Hazel installed, but I wanted to mention it anyway.

If you again move the old files out of the way and install Hazel, do you get the errors? Are you syncing any rules?

Mr_Noodle wrote:If you again move the old files out of the way and install Hazel, do you get the errors? Are you syncing any rules?

Yes, all the same.
And no, no syncing.

Can you email the rules in to support?

Mr_Noodle wrote:Can you email the rules in to support?

Sure! Can you PM me your address? Couldn’t find it on the website or in the forum.