Strange behavior: A lot of Zero KB .plist files

I don't know if this is normal behavior or not, but Hazel (2.3.2 on SL10A432) has been making a lot of .plist files in my ~/Library/Preferences folder. Is it supposed to do that, or is there something wrong with it?

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Looks like I have them too. I've checked with some other devs and they've noticed it as well (and with other apps, not Hazel). It seems to be a general SL bug where the preferences system fails to write out preferences and leaves the temporary files it creates sitting around. It is pretty sporadic as I can only get it to trigger once in a while. It may show up with Hazel more if you are futzing with it since that creates more opportunities for it to fail.

I've filed a bug with Apple so we'll see what happens with that. From what I can tell, they should be able to be safely removed unless the file was just created in the last few seconds.

In any case, thanks for reporting it.

Same here. I have over 230 of them in my Preferences folder.

If I get to 500, do I get a prize?

Sorry, 500 won't win you any prize: I had 2,451 bogus Hazel plist files in my Preferences folder!

I have been having problems with Hazel for the past month (roughly when I installed Snow Leopard, but I'm not sure that's when it started) in which Hazel absolutely refuses to process rules on one of my folders. This folder has been set up in Hazel for 2+ years and working fine. Now all of a sudden Hazel just ignores all the rules assigned to it, even though every other folder continues to be monitored just fine. I exported the rules, deleted and readded the folder and reimported the rules, but it still ignored it. Then I deleted everything and manually recreated the rules and Hazel still ignores the folder. It is a normal folder in my home folder on my internal HDD, so there are no strange external or network drive issues here.

Anyway, I decided to nuke all of Hazel's preferences and App Support files and do a fresh install to see if I could get it working again, and that's when I discovered that I had 2,451 Havel plist files. Not sure whether this is Apple's bug or Hazel's bug, but there certainly seems to be a problem there! The only other app that had created similar bogus plist files was QuickTimeX. It had about 60 plist files, but nothing like Hazel!

Drew

Check the release notes. This was for the most part addressed in the latest release(s). In short, it is a Snow Leopard bug but Hazel had a tendency to trigger it. I've reduced that greatly but it will never totally go away until Apple fixes the base problem.