Saturday, February 2, 2013

Data Detectors Crash in Cocoa Text Views

rdar://13128709:

type “File:///”. The capital ‘F’ is important. On the third /, it crashes.

And the crash reporter, Mail, and even the Spotlight menu can crash when displaying the text. In some apps you can prevent the crash by unchecking Edit ‣ Substitutions ‣ Data Detectors. For Mail, there’s a defaults command.

Update (2013-03-16): The bug appears to be fixed in Mac OS X 10.8.3.

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

Certainly the funniest bug during the Core Rot days of OS X.

Am I on the wrong track in assuming this bug has something to do with the efforts to Sandbox and keep apps away from the file system via changes at the top Cocoa level? That was my first uneducated guess, at least...

@Chucky My guess is that this is not related to sandboxing.

Chucky: This has nothing to do with that. This has to do with one data detector pass catching all spellings of the file URL protocol scheme, shortly followed by the next pass asserting that it's all file in lowercase, upon which point it promptly crashes, naturally, because that sort of code is insane and illogical and just plain doesn't work. There are plenty of sandbox or sandbox-ish mishaps, but this is not one of them.

[...] like this bug, though it’s in a different OS subsystem. It’s apparently fixed in Mavericks and iOS [...]

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