How to debug "The application Preview is not open anymore"?

During many years, using different versions of MacOS ( Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Big Sur ) I got this error message upon trying to launch Preview ( and sometimes Safari ):

The application Preview is not open anymore.

I am not yet able to reproduce this bug ( otherwise I would have submitted a useful bug report ).

In the case I am working on now, the error is true: Preview is not open anymore. Neither ps nor Activity Monitor find it.

If I try to start the application with: open /Applications/Preview.app I get a slightly more intelligent error message: LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -600 for the file /Applications/Preview.app.

But it appears that in fact this function is deprecated ( from the developer official documentation ).

I am actually working with opensnoop and dtruss to get which process is seeing this application not present and why this could block it starting again.

How may I further debug this blocking error of MacOS?

  • What is highly strange is that this function LSOpenURLsWithRole is marked as deprecated ending on version 10.10 ( Yosemite ) developer LSOpenURLsWithRole documentation

    How is it possible that the application Preview.app might use it on a version of MacOS which is the 10.13 ( High Sierra: because this is the one on which the incident is under debugging )?

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[empty answer to replace the missing function: delete answer.]