Finder: “There is no default application specified …”

February 1st, 2009 | Tagged as

After creating a disk image (hdiutil create) and subsequently copying the files careleslly from within the bundle folder directly into my home directory, I could not anymore access my home directory from Finder. The error I got was “There is no default application specified to open the document”. Finder was recognizing my home directory as “package”.

Command line access worked fine all the time. To resolve the problem, I removed all mistakenly copied bundle files from my home directory:

-rw-r--r--   1 ivk  staff  499 Jan 18 23:47 Info.bckup
-rw-r--r--   1 ivk  staff  499 Jan 18 23:47 Info.plist
drwxr-xr-x  18 ivk  staff  612 Jan 18 23:47 bands
-rw-r--r--   1 ivk  staff    0 Jan 18 23:47 token

Finder however still displayed the same message, even after removing the mistakenly copied files. To me it appeared as if some kind of flag was set on the home directory, instructing applications which read the flag to act as if my home dir was not a regular directory (anymore).

The actual resolution of the problem was to run SetFile utility which sets (or resets) attributes on files or directories:

$ /usr/bin/SetFile -a b /Users/ivk

Note: The SetFile man page does not list attribute b (or B) amongst those that can be applied to directory, the command however worked well. Used on HFS+ filesystem (Mac OS Extended), on OS X 10.5.6.

7 Comments

Jesper M
April 23rd, 2009 at 07:17

Thanks for the tip, it was driving me nuts!

Ivo
April 26th, 2009 at 13:59

Glad you found this useful..

Jennier
May 15th, 2009 at 08:55

Thank-you! I did the same thing trying to retrieve some iPhoto albums from a damaged hard-drive, and wouldn’t have figured out the answer on my own.

Carlos
May 31st, 2009 at 02:49

I love you! This was driving me nuts, and the other solutions were too obtuse (backup, delete user, restore..) Thanks for the elegant solution.

Alberto
October 18th, 2009 at 19:32

Thanks for the tip. I was googling “Can not open home directory on osx” and when I entered the error code your tip came up. This is great. I made the same mistake with the iPhoto album retrieval.

Ivo
October 18th, 2009 at 19:36

I’m really happy this small blog post helped you guys.

Keith
December 23rd, 2009 at 17:23

THANK YOU!!

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