Remove com.apple.sidebarlists.plist from 450 user accounts

Question

I have moved my Users data to a new drive and all of the users are able to login and authenticate, however, the users get an error message on attempting to access their items from the sidebar. The solution I have found is to remove the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and the sidebar and home directory then works fine. What I need is the UNIX command to remove the .plist file from 450 user accounts. Thanks -Eric

Answer 1

Funny you ask this - because I just went through the same thing with 500 user accounts. But Roger's looks a little more elegant than mine...
Here is my script - this one is for all users in one folder:
dir=/Volumes/diskname/restofpath
filename=com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
destdir=Library/Preferences
for user in `ls $dir`
do
echo Removing sidebar for $user
echo rm $dir/$user/$destdir/$filename
done
This one is for users in subfolders (or group folders):
dir=/Volumes/diskname/restofpath
filename=com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
destdir=Library/Preferences
for subdir in `ls $dir`
do
for user in `ls $dir/$subdir`
do
echo Removing sidebar for $user
echo rm $dir/$user/$destdir/$filename
done
done
One caveat - it didn't seem to work when the users were currently logged in.
Good luck!