Parallels Desktop 5 Will Not Install Due to Conflicting Applications - February 13, 2010
While trying to install the latest update to Parallels Desktop 5, I ran into an installation road block because the installer claimed 10 different Parallels applications were running and needed to be closed. Clearly, this was not the case. My first thought was to blame Parallels, but then an Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader update failed for the same reason–the installer claimed certain applications were running when they were not. While using the OS X Terminal, I realized certain commands were not working. I could not “less” a file. “grep” returned nothing even when I searched for strings that were clearly there. It turns out my entire /usr/bin directory had multiple executable files showing 0 bytes! “less” showed 0 bytes and also showed thousands of links to it–the same was true for many standard command line utilities. Installers like Parallels and Adobe depend on command line utilities found in /usr/bin. For example, to determine if certain programs are running, the installer will run a shell script that uses the “ps” command. If you’re curious what that would look like, here is the exact script that Parallels Desktop 5 uses:
#!/bin/sh
if ps -w -w -A -ocommand | grep -nq ‘^/Library/Parallels/Parallels Server.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_vm_app’; then
exit 1
fi
if ps -w -w -A -ocommand | grep -nq ‘^/Library/Parallels/Parallels Service.app/Contents/MacOS/prl_vm_app’; then
exit 1
fi
exit 0