Digital Assets

Clear Nonexistant Apps from Finder’s “Open With” Menu on the Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard

February 5, 2008 – 11:03 pm

There is a weird glitch on Mac OS Tiger and Leopard too whereby a ghost icon of un-installed apps remain in Finder’s “open with” list. You reach this menu by navigating to Finder > File > Open With. You can also reach a context menu version of this list by right-clicking (or Command-clicking) on a file you’d like to open.

This little issue can get pretty annoying if you’ve updated an app a few times, each time trashing the old version and installing the new version. You’ll end up with several duplicate versions of the same app in the “open with” list.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix (although there is a side-effect — see below). Here’s what to do:

If you’re running Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4):

1. Open up Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal).

2. Copy the following code (all of it), paste it into Terminal, and press Enter:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

If you’re running Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5):

Use the following code instead:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

As mentioned above, there is a smallish side-effect: your file-type associations will be erased, so you’ll have to recreate those.

Here are some other posts dealing with the issue:

• Apple: Clearing the Finder “Open With” contextual menu on Mac OS X 10.4, Mac OS X 10.3, Mac OS X 10.2, Mac OS X 10.0
• MacApper: Clear the Finder’s “Open With” Menu - Check out the comments on this post for a good discussion of why the Apple method mentioned above is inadequate.
• Macworld: Remove Fusion 2 Windows apps from Open With menu - Maybe this tip will also work with Parallels windows apps?