Snow Leopard Services menu says it's "Building..."

Question

The Snow Leopard Services menu tells me it's "Building..." but it's been over an hour and the status is still the same. How long is this process supposed to be?

Solution

You can manually rebuild the LaunchServices database by entering the following in the Terminal:

In Snow Leopard (thanks to Lawrence Velázquez for pointing this out):

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

In older versions of the Mac OS X:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

Or read more online where I found the tip: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031215144430486

I went to the trouble of adding this as an alias in my .bashrc file so I could rebuild at whim.

Comments

[FrancisV]

The Services menu went back after a few minutes of posting this message. How long does it normally take for the Services menu to rebuild itself when a new service is added?

[dbr]

Have you tried rebooting..?

[Lawrence Velázquez]

This command is no longer the correct command in Snow Leopard. The executable is located at /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks‌​/LaunchServices.fram‌​ework/Support/lsregi‌​ster.

[Syed Ismail Ahamed]

Updated. What's strange I find is that when I run my alias, the command I originally supplied still worked. When I copy-pasted it out of my .bashrc, it failed with a File Not Found. Very strange, I have no idea why it continued to work for me, but thanks for noticing the error.