Technical Q&A QA1288
Suppressing the "unexpectedly quit" alert


Q: How can I suppress the "The application <application> has unexpectedly quit" alert?

A: You can suppress this alert (in Mac OS X 10.3) by modifying CrashReporter's default settings from the command line:

defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType <setting>

The currently available settings are:

"none" = don't show any dialog at all (crash reports are still silently written to disk)

"prompt" = show the unexpectedly quit dialog and prompt to see if the user wants to submit/view the crashreport

"crashreport" = don't show the unexpectedly quit dialog - instead immediately show the crashreport/submission screen.

Once modified, the DialogType setting will be written to ~Library/Preferences/com.apple.CrashReporter.plist.

There is currently no provision for modifying this setting programmatically.


[Oct 10, 2003]


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