Hi ganbustein. Thank you very much. I have lot's of experience with the DOS command line, but zero experience with Terminal, which seems to be the equivalent. Your instructions were excellent. They worked as expected. Here's my situation now.
Last login: Sat Oct 11 14:37:16 on console
MacBook-Pro:~ Daddy$ ls ~/.Trash
com.apple.Finder.plist com.apple.finder 14-06-19.plist
MacBook-Pro:~ Daddy$
MacBook-Pro:~ Daddy$ mv ~/.Trash/*.plist ~/Library/Preferences/
MacBook-Pro:~ Daddy$
I confirmed the move command worked using list: ls ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.find*
I’m wondering if something else more serious may be afoot?
ls ~/.Trash confirms nothing is in the trash, but the trash bin icon shows there is Something in the trash. After rebooting the MacBook Pro (OS X 10.6.8), Finder still won't launch, and my desktop files, although still on disc, do not show on the desktop.
I used:
defaults delete com.apple.Finder
hoping to delete both files, but this one wasn't deleted:
com.apple.finder 14-06-19.plist
Is this the right syntax to delete this file: com.apple.finder 14-06-19.plist
delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder 14-06-19.plist
Is it possible to embed some invisible control character into the file name. That happened in DOS once.
Any other ideas on what could be wrong and how to fix it?
