Major Problems With Safari

kuwan writes "There have been many problems reported with Safari on Apple's discussion boards. The two most prominent are that option-clicking on a link to download can replace your Home folder with the downloaded file, effectively nuking your Home folder. The other has been reported as a printing problem, but is far worse. The printing problem occurs because Safari deletes /tmp, which is a link to /private/tmp."

Comments

Re:hi

[antmo]

oops...

isn't /tmp a link to /private/tmp anyway?

Re:Specific and useful would be good here

[kuwan]

Well, my original post was truncated somewhat, I guess to make it fit better on the main page. The problem with /tmp being deleted is a big one. I don't know how to reproduce it yet, but 5 out of the 6 people I work with who have Macs all had /tmp deleted (including me). No one here had their home folder nuked however, but a lot of people have been reporting it on the discussion boards so that's why I included it.

What happens is that Safari may delete the /tmp symbolic link. The result is that a lot of applications that need to write to /tmp will not run, these problems may include:

1. Can't launch any Classic Application
2. Can't run Software Update. I get "an unexpected error has occured."
3. Can't log in as any other user except the Admin.
4. Can't print.

Not being able to run Software Update is a big problem since that would have been Apple's best delivery method to fix the problem.

Here's how you fix the problems.

You need to recreate the /tmp symbolic link (/tmp is just a link to /private/tmp).

1. Open the Terminal application.
2. Type "sudo ln -s /private/tmp /tmp" (without the quotes).
3. You'll be prompted for your password, so enter it.
4. Everything should now work like before (you may have to log out and then log back in again).

I agree that you should use caution with beta software, but considering that over 300,000 people downloaded it on the first day there are going to be a lot of people that are going to be needing a fix.