fileproviderctl Is Broken on macOS 13.6 Ventura

macOS 13.6 Ventura shipped a fileproviderctl binary with broken signing which rendered it useless and us unable to properly clean up the environment.

We are working mostly on the most recent stable releases of macOS. With our product, we need to support at least the previous major macOS release, too, though. At the time of writing and encounter of the problem the current release was macOS 14 Sonoma and the previous release macOS 13 Ventura.

The fileproviderctl is very handy to manipulate file providers outside of your app code. For us, the most important functionality is to remove file provider domains to clean up. Though, using the Terminal is neither a pleasant nor an easy experience for all of us.

Hence I wrote a macOS app which helps our developers and testers alike to restore a clean environment on macOS. It is a convenient and accessible app which takes care of most of the environment cleanup. That suddenly stopped to work for someone in particular. It did take only a few minutes to figure out that for whatever reason fileproviderctl is killed immediately upon execution. Our cleanup app utilizes fileproviderctl under the hood, so it broke, too. After a quick research on the web I found that others had the same problem. I was pointed into the direction of broken code signing and indeed, the binary was not signed correctly.

Meanwhile Apple fixed it with following updates for macOS 13 Ventura. So, if you are stuck or need to remain on macOS 13 Ventura for some reason, there is the easy solution of just updating. A full upgrade to macOS 14 Sonoma is not necessary to resolve the problem.

This experience reminded me again not to take everything as granted.