Reinstalling Leopard's Address Book

Posted: July 26, 2008
Author: Scott Newman
Category: Mac

While working with a Bash script, I ungracefully used "/" instead of "./" and wiped out a portion of my Leopard installation. Luckily, I was able to stop it when I noticed it didn't finish after a second, but damage has been done. So far, I've only noticed problems with my Spotlight index and Address Book, but who knows what else I've hosed. I was able to reinstall Address Book, but it wasn't as easy as the Apple Docs said it would be.

According to this Apple article, it should have been as easy as inserting the Leopard DVD, navigating to Optional Installs, and choosing Address Book. Unfortunately, all the options under Applications were greyed out.

A half-hour of Google searches didn't help, so I right clicked on the "Installed Bundled Software Only" alias and chose "Show Original". To my surprise (and pleasure!) I found individual package installers for all of the bundled Applications.

I double-clicked on AddressBook.pkg and now I have my Address Book back. Since I had only wiped it out from the /Applications folder, my data was untouched and I'm back to normal.

I hope this helps someone else who makes a stupid shell scripting mistake!