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A few years ago, I set a policy for Chrome on my Mac.

I can see this policy and its value via chrome://policy. It says that it applies to "Current user". But for the life of me I can't remember where the local policy file is stored.

Oddly, I can't find anything on Google (though I vaguely remember having difficulty finding this location when I first set the policy value). I have looked in ~/Library/Application Support, ~/Library/Preferences, ~/Library/Google, and their corresponding directories at root.

Any ideas? This is really bugging me.

I'm currently doing a full-hardrive search for the string, so if I find the file, I'll post an answer.

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  • So after searching my disk, I only found localization files... no preference files. Which means it may be a binary-encoded plist.
    – baum
    Jan 7, 2015 at 23:37

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Welp, I fixed it.

TL; DR: always check ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist!

Who would have thought that there would be hidden preferences in an already hidden directory? Not me, for sure.

.GlobalPreferences.plist is used for universal settings — highlight color, spelling, keyboard & mouse, etc. — that apply to all applications. Applications will also check this file for their own Preference keys. However, because it was hidden, I didn't think to check it.

I found the key that was causing the policy issue, deleted it, and relogged (required). No more issue.

I'm not sure why past-me put the preference in this file (bad idea), rather than in Chrome's plist file (which exists in the same directory!).


A side note — the reason why I wasn't finding the key in my full-drive searches:
The plist looks something like this (abbreviated):

...
<key>PolicyNameWasHere</key><integer>1</integer>
...

My search program, apparently, was only looking for that word, not the string. Due to the lack of whitespace, it didn't get picked up.

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