MacOS – I have a directory behaving very strangely

macos

I have a directory that is behaving very strangely, perhaps it got corrupted. I can move the directory freely, either in Finder or terminal (I'm running Mac OS X Lion). But any query on the 'internals' of the folder (ls, rm, du, etc…) hangs. Not just fails, but I can't even kill the process with ^C, I need to force quit the terminal app and restart the app.

Any thoughts on what's happening and how to fix it?

Best Answer

If I had to put money on this I would bet on a disk problem -- Generally speaking the filesystem won't just hang for no reason: It's usually because it asked the disk to read or write something and the disk is taking its sweet time responding.

If you are not already using it, I strongly suggest installing and using the latest version of SMARTreporter to monitor your drive for failure signs.

If SMARTreporter gives your drive a clean bill of health try running "Verify Filesystem" and "Repair Disk Permissions" (available through Disk Utility) -- If "Verify Filesystem" finds problems you may need to boot off your OS X install/recovery disk in order to repair the problem.

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MacOS – “X11 could not be opened” then “X11 canceled restart”

You can force X11 to quit, which will allow for a normal reboot but won't fix whatever problems are causing X11 to fail to launch / hang / otherwise misbehave.

Open terminal and type:

 killall X11

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MacOS – Mac has become insanely slow : Processes SystemUIServer, UserEventAgent and loginwindow using a lot of memory

First of all: High Memory-Usage is not a bad thing in itself - the goal is to have a performant system and it can accomplish that by using RAM.

That you Mac slows down is more likely a problem that a process or an App is hogging Memory and not correctly releasing it, forcing the system to use Swap-Memory (on your Harddrive) and thereby slowing your system down, but that is just one possible scenario.

I think it is necessary to differentiate that because i think you are looking at the wrong place for your problem.

Other Possibilities could be wrong File Permissions, I/O errors of your Harddrive or SSD, timout issues for some process or App (Google Drive, Dropbox etc), corrupted chaches or swap files.

You should:

check the CPU-Usage in the 'Activity Monitor.app' Is there a Process/App that is using up your CPU and slowing your system?
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try booting your system in 'safe mode' by holding the shift key on startup. Can you reproduce the problem in that mode?

Try that and post your findings.

Best Answer

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MacOS – “X11 could not be opened” then “X11 canceled restart”

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