Terry Harpold

I ended up taking the tougher path. Made a full Time Machine backup to an external drive, booted into the Recovery HD volume, erased the boot volume, reinstalled High Sierra (so, a clean install), then restored all my applications and data. (Important here is the use of an external drive for the restore, not our house Time Capsule. Time Machine restores via wifi are OK for retrieving the odd file but they are, in my experience, unreliable for complete reinstalls.) That took several worrisome hours (700+ GB of data to copy over) but after rebooting, a few account setup tasks, everything seems to be working as it should. Still a few glitches with software that need serial numbers and the like. But the dyn.age80c6du problem is definitely corrected and my system appears stable (no weird crashes and lockups as before.) Still no idea how this happened or what in fact the clean install effectively repaired. Thanks to those who offered suggestions. So grateful for the leads this discussion gave me that, as forecast, I've purchased the Alfred Power Pack. Still learning all that I can do with Alfred but overall pleased with features of the application.

Tried creating a new user account. All apps there are also of type dyn.agec6du. Once I determined that, I didn't stick around long in the new account, as it seems likely that the problem is at a system level. Understand about the need for reliable backups, have been a faithful backer-upper since my first Mac in 1984. I thought I had such a system in place – Time Machine, diligent weekly CCC backups to rotating media, Arq backing data up to Amazon Glacier every AM – until my system started going haywire and the risk that my backups might be already corrupted began to emerge. My data probably *is* OK. It will be possible to pull down backups from Glacier, or to resurrect them from Time Machine, but that will be costly and time-consuming. I face the prospect of probably having to reinstall many individual applications, deal with publishers about registrations, etc. That's a multi-day misadventure. My guess is that what has happened if pretty arcane – though at least one other person has has this problem, thus this thread – but it *feels* like a switch somewhere just needs to be flipped, if I can find it. Am hoping that a full-on OS reinstall – which I would do prior to moving to Mojave anyway – will not have to made NOW. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that the OS can get confused in this way and that there may be nothing short of a complete reinstall that can fix it.

Overwrote the existing OS, via a reinstallation from the Recovery HD. Am worried about a clean installation; not sure if I have truly secure backups of everything else: one of the symptoms of this problem has been corrupted Time Machine backups and I'm not convinced that all of my backed-up data is secure. I have Carbon Copy Cloner backups but, again, I'm worried, as my backup rotation of those went through several cycles after I suspect this problem existed. Maybe the problem is only this flag for applications, and a clean installation and restoring of my data would be OK? An then I could wipe all the Time Machine backups and start fresh. But we're in the middle of the semester, I have grant proposals due, letter deadlines for job candidates, journal articles due. Twelve to fourteen hour days every day. There's never a good time to do a clean installation but now is a *really* terrible time to lose a day to that. My hope is that getting the system to remember the correct application file type is less cataclysmic than that. ? On a side note: have run hardware checks on the laptop, with DriveDX, Apple's hardware diagnostics, the Time Machine is working fine for other computers in the household, etc. Disk Utility always reports this laptop as without problems. I'm convinced that the application file type problem is the telling symptom of whatever happened here. Just have to figure it out.

Well, a reinstallation of macOS, and a subsequent rebuilding of the LaunchServices database from the Terminal didn't correct this weird problem; all of my applications are still of file type "dyn.agec6du". I tried deleted a couple of App Store applications and reinstalling them. They were reinstalled also of type "dyn.agec6du". That suggests to me that some flag somewhere is set in such a way that my system doesn't recognize an application as an application-bundle. The applications will run – well, until something, maybe background housekeeping? something having to do with quitting the applications? – will cause the system to lock up. I'm hoping that someone here knows of a terminal command, or a file that I can delete or repair deep in the system that will reset this flag.

I should perhaps add that I've getting thousands of error messages of this type in Console: LaunchServices: Database mapping failed with result -10813 LaunchServices: store or url (null) was nil -10813, retrying

Thanks. I tried that. No change: all applications are still of type "dyn.age80c6du", Alfred and Spotlight can't find them and I'm still unable to restart my computer without a hard shutdown. I had tried earlier to rebuild the Launch Services database with this command – /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user Is the syntax of the command you suggested better for this? I believe that I picked up the syntax I used from an Apple tech support page several years ago. TH

I've been struggling with what appear to be symptoms of the same problem for several weeks – all my application bundles mysteriously were somehow reset to type "dyn.age80c6du" – and this discussion is the only one on the 'net that I've found that appears to identity the cause of my symptoms. I've used Alfred Metadata Tool to discover that ALL of my apps are set to this type, not to "com.apple.application-bundle" as they should be; I've no idea how this happened. 2017 MacBook Pro, macOS 10.13.6. Reinstalling macOS from the Recovery HD, nuking and rebuilding the Spotlight index with Alfred, rebuilding permissions with Terminal, etc. hasn't helped. I would greatly welcome any advice about what to try next – some arcane terminal command that will return my applications to their correct file type? My computer misbehaves in all manner of crazy ways, hanging apps, refusing to shut down, corrupting Time Machine backups, etc. I'm not a registered Alfred user though it's an impressive application. I will very happily buy the Powerpack a couple of times over if someone can help me get out of this mess.