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If you search Apple's Support site, you may occasionally come across an article that ends with the following sentence: "This document will be updated as more information becomes available."

That sentence is Apple-speak for: The problem described in this article is a known bug. It will hopefully be fixed in the next update to the relevant software. At the very least, we hope to post a simple work-around here sometime soon. In the meantime, what is posted now is at best an awkward work-around that may well require entering commands in Terminal.

Here are two recent examples of these Apple-recommended Terminal work-arounds:

-- After updating to Safari 3.1 (on a Mac running Mac OS X 10.5.2), you may be unable to successfully sync your bookmarks to .Mac, an iPhone or an iPod touch. If so, quit Safari, launch Terminal and type the following:

Alternatively, using a utility such as Apple's Property List Editor (you have it in your Developer/Applications/Utilities folder if you have installed Apple's Xcode software), open the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist file, locate the RegisteredSafariSyncClient property, click the Delete button, and save the modified file.

-- A mounted hard drive's icon may not appear in the Finder; not on the Desktop, not in Finder window sidebars. However, you are still able to navigate to the drive's contents via the Go to Folder command in the Finder's Go menu. If this happens, Apple suggests (apparently with a straight face) the following solution:

If the problem is with the startup volume, type the following two commands in Terminal:

For any other volume, substitute /Volumes/name of the hard drive for the / at the end of each line.

Log out and log back in. You should now see the drive in the Finder.