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Recently I switched from Windows to OS X, and now I've run into the first problem that isn't easy for me to solve.

On Windows, I had the application FortiClient installed. The application had an entry in the regedit where some data were stored. Now I'm wondering how I can apply these settings also on the installation within OS X. I guess there must be some kind of folder where data is stored, but I wasn't able to find it. Any ideas?

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  • Is the file installed as a dmg? Have you tried exploring that folder? Mar 22, 2013 at 0:16
  • Most apps under MacOS/X will put user specific app information under ~<username>/Library/<Application> or ~<username>/Library/Preferences/<Application>.plist ...
    – tink
    Mar 22, 2013 at 0:17

2 Answers 2

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Many settings are stored in property list files in ~/Library/Preferences/. You can convert them to xml to edit or read them in a text editor:

plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

Sandboxed applications use files like ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TextEdit.plist. find ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit -type f shows all files in the sandbox container.

For example Chrome stores settings in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/.

You can find support files with something like mdfind TextEdit or mdfind com.apple.TextEdit.

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The setting is likely stored in the application's preferences .plist file. If this is the case there are two places where preferences are stored. System-wide preferences (akin to HKLM registry keys on Windows) are stored in /Library/Preferences/. User-specific preferences (akin to HKLU registry keys in Windows) are stored in /Users/[your username]/Library/Preferences/. I do not know the exact name of the preferences file for Forticlient, but it is likely something like com.forticlient.plist.

Before trying to edit the preferences file you should know that some .plist files are text and other .plist files are binary. The easiest way to edit a .plist file IMO is to use TextWrangler , an excellent and free text editor, because TextWrangler will automatically handle text and binary .plist files.

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