Mac OS X apps show question marks or damaged or incomplete error

I've ran into this with individual applications over the years, and can typically solve it with either a permission repair or reinstalling the app. Today I ran into this for ALL applications for a user. You couldn't run Terminal, Safari, Disk Utility... The only thing that appeared to be ok was Finder.

I logged into another account on the machine and everything worked fine. I ran the usual disk utility commands, but no luck fixing the issue. Then I created a new account and logged in, and that account was ok too. That made me expect user profile corruption. I backed up the files, deleted the user account, then set it up again. First login and the same problem, the entire dock was question marks and nothing would run. Whatever the issue, it appeared to be directly related to this user account, but wasn't in the profile.

After wasting a bunch of additional time trying to troubleshoot this, I finally ran across the answer in the MacRumors.com forum (thank you jpete for posting it). The system folders, specifically /var/folders/, contain some cache files from user accounts. What I found is that each folder is specific to a user account, and that user account may or may not still exist in Users & Accounts. Almost like a secondary user profile area that persists even after the account has been removed. This is where the problem was. I found the folder related to the user experiencing issues by using Get Info to see who the owner of the folder was, then went into the folder named 0 (that's a zero) and deleted all the contents that it would allow me to. After rebooting I was able to login with that user account and everything was working again.

The easiest way for you to try this is to login to the account having issues and then go to Finder->Go->Go to Folder. In there type /var/folders/, then it'll open in Finder. Now go into each of the two-character folders one by one and do Get Info on the folder it contains (long alphanumeric name) until you find one that shows the username that has problems as the owner. Once you find that, go into the long alphanumeric name folder and you should be able to access the 0 (zero), C, and T folders. Do not delete those folders themselves (not sure you can even if you tried), but go into them and delete all the contents within that the system will allow you to delete. Once done, reboot the system and try logging in. Hopefully it will show you the icons in the Dock and let you run your apps once again.

Assuming you don't have Time Machine to go back to before the problem started, if this doesn't work and you have access to a 2nd account that does work on that same Mac, your best bet is to create a new user account with a different username and move your files and settings over to it from the account that has problems. Or you could back up everything and run through an installation, cleaning the drive in the process, so you have a completely fresh start.

OneDrive "file wasn't uploaded... changes can't be merged" error

I ran into this with a user and thought it would be a relatively easy fix by telling Microsoft Excel to discard the changes. Unfortunately it took more than that, as the changes were cached for upload to OneDrive and discarding the changes from within Excel didn't remove the cached file. OneDrive doesn't control that file cache either. Instead, it's buried within another tool called the Microsoft Upload Center. The Microsoft KB articles I found referencing it say to simply search for it, then use it to delete the cached file. It doesn't quite work that way, or at least didn't for me with the Office 2016 applications. Searching gives you no results, making you wonder if you even have the application. It's there, but you have to go the long way through Windows Explorer.

If you're having the same or a similar problem, open the Microsoft Upload Center application. You can find it within your Office installation folder. This folder is typically

32-bit Office install - C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16
64-bit Office install - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16

In that folder you'll find MSOUC.EXE, which is the Microsoft Upload Center application. Open that and it will show you any files that are pending upload to OneDrive. Assuming the changes you made are either no longer needed, or you have them saved already in a copy of the OneDrive document, removing problematic files from here will resolve the issue where you can't update or upload to OneDrive because of merge issues. Once removed from the Upload Center, the next time you open that document it'll pull down a new copy of the file to your OneDrive cache so you can once again work on it. That also means removing the file from the cache will also discard any changes you had made to the file since the last time it was able to sync to OneDrive, so keep that in mind.

If you keep having problems, within the Microsoft Upload Center settings, you can tell it to delete the entire cache and start over. That can be used as a secondary option if selectively removing specific files doesn't work. But again, be careful if you've made changes to these documents and want to keep those changes, as deleting the cache also means the changes you've made since the last successful OneDrive sync will be lost.

Time Machine "Can't connect to a current Time Machine backup disk"

I decided to start using Time Machine alongside Crashplan to make sure I had a local backup. Plus I'm backing up ~8TB of data on that particular Mac device so having a quick restore option makes a lot of sense.

I purchased a new Thunderbolt 3 drive with plenty of storage and set up Time Machine. Easy enough, right? It only took 2 days to get the initial backup and everything looked like it was working fine. Then I went to try a test restore and that's where I ran into problems. As I entered the Time Machine system to view what was available to restore, an error popped up saying "Can't connect to a current Time Machine backup disk". Nothing would display and I would have to exit. At first I tried a reboot, which didn't work. Then I noticed that the disk displayed a little odd in the Time Machine Preferences so I started over by reselecting my disk and waiting another 2 days for it to redo the initial backup. No luck after that either. That's when I asked my friend Google and found that I should've started there because the answer was very simple...

I had NO permission to access the time machine backup database folder! Why in the world would that be the default setting?! You can confirm that this is your issue too by going into the Time Machine disk and trying to view the contents of the Backups.backupdb folder. If you see a red no-go sign or can't view, you're having the same problem I was.

Luckily it's easy to fix, but you have to use Terminal (Application->Utilities->Terminal) because Finder doesn't seem to work to change permissions on this particular folder. Once you have Terminal open

1. cd /Volumes/TimeMachineDriveName (make sure you put the name of your Time Machine disk here after /Volumes/)
2. sudo chgrp admin Backups.backupdb

The first command just gets you to the Time Machine drive that you need to work with. The second changes the group permissions so that the admin group on your machine can access the folder and it's contents. It will ask you to enter your password after the 2nd command, which is normal when you use sudo to run the command as the root user. Once you've done this you should be able to go back to Time Machine and actually view what has been backed up, and restore files/folders when needed

Replace character in variable within batch script

I wanted to rename a file using a batch script so it would replace underscores '_' with hyphens '-'. It was pretty easy

Set img1=this-was_the_original-name-of_the_file
Set newName=%img1:_=-%
echo %newName%

The key to doing it is the :_=- in the second line, which is saying take the text value stored in the variable img1 and make underscores instead equal hyphens. Now, you could make line 2 instead be

Set img1=%img1:_=-%

If you don't need to reference the original value you're storing in img1 later, but for my purposes I was renaming a file so I needed both the original filename and what the new filename should be, so I had to store the new name with the hyphens in a separate variable

Exchange Resource room only shows who scheduled in Outlook

Apparently the default behavior of resources in Exchange is to replace the subject line with the organizer's name. I'm not going to argue whether or not that is pointless, but I will tell you how to fix it. It's a simple one-line powershell command you can run.

Make sure you connect to the Exchange (or Exchange Online) Powershell, and then run

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity resourceName -DeleteSubject $False -AddOrganizerToSubject $False

Make sure you replace "resourceName" with the actual name of your resource. Running that will leave the original subject line intact so you don't have to check the organizer's calendar to see what the meeting is about if trying to schedule a resource.

I originally found the answer in this Microsoft support article