MacOS – How to determine what application is asking “Where is GrowlHelperApp.App?”

growlmacos

I recently upgraded to OS X 10.9 Mavericks and am now seeing a "Choose Application" dialog pop up every minute or two asking: "Where is the GrowlHelperApp.app?". I don't particularly want to buy the new version of Growl, so how can I determine which application is looking for it so that I can change it's preferences or remove it?

Choose Application dialog: Where is GrowlHelperApp.app?

Update: It turns out that it was an old Dashboard widget that was looking for Growl. I found this out by deleting all of my Dashboard widgets since I haven't used it in a while, but I'd still be interested in finding out how one would discover what is launching this dialog.

Best Answer

You could have used sudo opensnoop to see what files are being opened or fseventer to see what files are being modified.

Those dialogs are often shown by AppleScripts that have reference a missing application. You could also have tried running mdfind GrowlHelperApp, but it doesn't search the contents of compiled scripts or scripts saved as applications.

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Another, possibly quicker way, is to drag it into your dock (if not already there), then right-click it, go to Options>Open at Login. Then drag it out of your dock if you don't want it to stay in your dock.

How to growl be used with syslog

According to man syslog.conf, Mac OS X's syslog.conf can handle messages only by writing to a file, sending to a remote host's syslog, and send them to users' consoles.

Your best option is probably to send to a file, and write a daemon or a periodically running script that consumes this file and calls growlnotify with what it reads from the file, something like the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
while read line
do
    /usr/local/bin/growlnotify "Your App" -m "$line"
done < /path/to/file
echo -n > /path/to/file

Either keep this running all the time by wrapping in a loop, or start it every few seconds using a launchd job and the StartInterval directive. man launchd and man launchd.plist can help you here.

Best Answer

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How to growl be used with syslog

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