This is from
http://www.macosxhints.com and I've tried it and seems to work;
I was installing the Gnu PGP tools recently, and stumbled onto a command line tool calledplutil. This tool will parse any selected files and validate them as well formed XML. It can also convert a specified file from one XML format to another. Anyway, the point here is, it occurs to me that corrupted preference files are likely to fail this validity test.
As such, I created a shell script that parses the two most common places where preference plist files are found, and returns the errors if any are found. Armed with this information, one can decide to trash the files or inspect them. I will be placing this shell script in/usr/local/bin on my client systems, so I can ssh into them and run the script when problems are being reported. Later, I may automate a nightly job that notifies either me or the user.
#!/bin/sh
# plist_chk.sh
find /Library/Preferences -name "*.plist" -print0 | \
xargs -0 /usr/bin/plutil -lint -s
find /Users -name "*.plist" -print0 | \
xargs -0 /usr/bin/plutil -lint -s
=================================================
Open Terminal - type
sudo then paste this;
find /Library/Preferences -name "*.plist" -print0 | \
xargs -0 /usr/bin/plutil -lint -s
find /Users -name "*.plist" -print0 | \
xargs -0 /usr/bin/plutil -lint -s
and give it your password.
