I keep hearing that if any of my programs start to act oddly within Mac OS X that one culprit can be the preferences file for that particular program. That’s all well and good, but what if the corrupted preferences file is messing up things I can’t see? Surely there’s some way to check or verify the preference files to ensure all is well?

A fascinating question, because I too have been wondering about the mysterious new XML-format “plist” files in Mac OS X and how to ascertain if any of them are messed up without having the associated application start spitting up bits.

It turns out that there’s a great little command-line application accessible within Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) that performs just what you seek, a plist verification program called…

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