Background

Did you upgrade to Mac OSX 10.7 Lion (or any other OSX afterwards) and now Pd crashes on startup? This might be happening since Lion saves the window states when apps are closed and reopens them for you. This can be bad for Pd if there is a clash over resources (sockets, etc when trying to open patches too quickly or simultaneously.

Luckily, there is a way to manually tell the operating system not to ignore window states and that's by simply locking the folder where this information is kept. This way it always opens Pd with an empty state.

A Clean Slate

Before locking the folder, make sure to remove the existing state, otherwise it will keep opening with whatever windows it last saved. You can hold Option when quitting (aka Cmd+Opt+Q ) Pd to bypass the OSX save state mechanism and delete any current states.

Another option is to use the Terminal:

rm -rf ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/org.puredata.*

If you had startup crashes, this should at least get Pd back but it dosen't disable state saving ...

Locking the State Folder

Now that you have a clean slate, you can disable the state saving mechanism for Pd by locking the state folder for Pd-Extended using the Get Info dialog (CMD+I):

~/Library/Saved Application State/org.puredata.*

"~/" is your user home directory.

There may be more then one folder named "org.puredata..." as (at the time of writing), Pd-vanilla and Pd-extended use slightly different identifiers. Anyway, if you're clearing one, you'd probably want to clear both.

As before, you can also use the Terminal:

chflags -v uchange ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/org.puredata.*

The "uchange" flag locks the folder.

References

• Delete specific application saved states from mac OS X 10.7 Lon Resume
• pd-list
• Locked files and Mac OSX