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   Eliminate Duplicates in the Open With Submenu

   Adam C. Engst

   Every now and then, solutions to problems just fall from the sky, or,
   in this case, from [1]TidBITS Talk. In a recent post, Shirley Jordan
   noted that whenever she right-clicked on a document in the Finder and
   displayed the Open With submenu to open the document in something other
   than its default application, every application in the menu appeared
   twice. Quick responses from Miraz Jordan, Alan Forkosh, and Curtis
   Wilcox revealed that the problem was a corrupt Launch Services database
   and a single Terminal command can resolve it, as can options in
   utilities like [2]Cocktail.

   I was in the same situation ' I'd been seeing two or even three copies
   of each application in the Open With submenu, but it was never annoying
   enough to hunt down the solution. So I was happy to have it fall in my
   lap via email, and after pasting the command below (as one line) into
   Terminal and relaunching the Finder by Control-Option-clicking its Dock
   icon and choosing Relaunch, my Open With submenu shrunk to only a
   single copy of each application.

   Conrad Hirano subsequently noted that relaunching the Finder wasn't
   sufficient for his Mac to reset its Open With submenu completely, and
   he needed to log out and back in to finish the job. Personally,
   whenever anything is being weird, I prefer restarting the Mac entirely,
   which doesn't take significantly longer.

   sudo
   /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/Current/Fram
   eworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain
   local -domain system -domain user

   As far as I can tell, there's no downside to rebuilding the Launch
   Services database in this fashion, though it's also not something you
   should do without good reason, such as the duplicate entries in the
   Open With submenu.

References

   1. http://talk.tidbits.com/Double-Entries-in-Finder-td4657660.html
   2. http://www.maintain.se/cocktail

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