MacOS – Services menu polluted by apps from another installation

macosservices

Reinstalled 10.15, signed into icloud, had previous 10.13 on another partition for a while.

10.15 is a clean install. The apps that provide those services haven't even been installed.
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~/Library/Services is empty. Tried grepping the whole filesystem for those. No match.

The only place they seem to exist is in defaults manager. So I tried removing
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ServicesMenu.Services.plist and ~/Library/Preferences/pbs.plist. Didn't help.

Why are those services in that menu on a clean installation and how to I get rid of them?

Best Answer

Well, I'll be damned.

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In the evening I removed 10.13 partition. Immediately after the list remained the same. In the morning the list was fixed.

I believe what happened is, this list is constructed by scanning all available mountpoints. it went into the old volume and picked up the old service files. It probably runs an update every few hours.

This is such a weird behavior.