I dig the hole – and then I bitch!

For close to an year now, whenever I have tried to upload a file to any site using Safari – say attaching a file to a mail via webmail – I get this error:


“POSIX error: Invalid argument” (NSPOSIXErrorDomain:22) Please choose Report Bug to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message."

I have invariably moaned “Darn Safari” and switched to Firefox or Camino to upload the file and come back to Safari to continue browsing, without bothering to do anything about the problem except maybe hoping it would be “fixed” in the next release. Never so much as “Googling” the problem, which is so unlike me. Until today, which is ironical considering I switched to Firefox 3.0 beta sometime back, which is awesome btw.

I thought I would file a bug-report over at Apple but just before I did that, I thought I would look up the problem. And lo behold, right up there amongst the results I saw this:

That often happens when you have disabled the Safari cache… make sure that ~/Library/Caches/Safari has Read/Write permissions for you.

Sounded like something I could have messed around with because of my “caching is no longer necessary (( Network speeds are high enough not to warrant Internet caching by individual users. ))” belief:


~/Library/Caches lfc$ ls -l Safari
lrwxr-xr-x 1 lfc lfc 9 Aug 3 2007 Safari -> /dev/null

For the uninitiated, that’s the surest way of ensuring that nothing ever gets written to/ read from “Safari”. Look up /dev/null for details.

Removing that link and restarting Safari solved the “problem” – Safari recreates the folder on Startup and everyone lives happily thereafter.

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