There are many commercial Mac applications out there, which offer a free demo for download. Often you can use the full featured program for a limited time or a limited number of tasks. If you want to use the software after the trial period, you have to buy a licence for it. Sometimes I want to test these applications just a little bit longer, so I looked for a way to extend the trail period.
Since Mac OS doesn’t use something similar to the registry in Windows, the information about how many days are left for testing has to be stored somewhere in a file. If you knew the location of this file, you could just delete it and the trail period will start from the beginning. Of course, software developers don’t want you to do that. Therefore, these files are normally in locations you wouldn’t look and have meaningless names.
Fortunately, there is a tool which can help called fs_usage. This command line tool reports filesystem activity in real-time. Since there normally is a lot of activity going on, it is useful to filter out entries coming from the application of interest by grepping. You will also get information about what kind of activity is performed, allowing further filtering. With the following command you should be able to find the file of interest:
sudo fs_usage | grep applicationName | grep open
I deleted the file and was able to test the software further on, before making the decision to pay for it. If you want to test the application even longer without having to repeatedly deleting the file, you can try to change the file permissions (with
chmod) such that the file is not writable anymore. Of course, this will only work if the number of uses are counted there, not if the date of first program start is stored. Have fun!
). The output will help you fix the demo. Let me know if you need help!
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