Troubleshooting computer problems is never particularly fun, and with so many potential third party add-ons, plugins, extensions, scripts, and whatever else is buried into OS X, how are you supposed to find everything to help determine what’s causing an issue? You need Consultant’s Canary, because whether you’re troubleshooting your own Mac or someone else’s, it’s going to save you tons of time and hassle.
Consultant’s Canary is a free self-contained python script that lists an absurd amount of information about the OS X installation that it’s launched from, including general system information, all login items, overly privileged processes, and a whole slew of third party system changes and augmentations, including address book plugins, Automator actions, additional frameworks, Safari plugins and extensions, kernel extensions, launchd jobs and launch agents, Mail plugins, third party System Preference panels, screen savers, Spotlight add ons, startup items, and more. Got all that? In other words, virtually every third party add-on that is currently installed on the Mac will be found and reported back in an easy to follow list that even includes the full file paths to the found items. Nothing is modified however, leaving the task of determining what doesn’t belong in the lists up to you.
Using Consultant’s Canary is easy, you can run the standalone Consultant’s Canary app directly on a single Mac which launches Terminal and a python script on it’s own, or you could open the apps package to find the heart of the app “dispatcher.py” which could then be used over a network to remotely diagnose and troubleshoot multiple Macs. The same version of Consultant’s Canary will work on any version of OS X later than 10.5, including Lion.
CC may just be the ultimate troubleshooting aid for Mac OS X, a remarkable feet for a free utility, making it’s an absolute must-have addition to a Mac power users toolkit.
Thanks to Jean N for the great tip
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