Thanks, I tried it but no luck. I had actually deleted that whole folder when I tried to reinstall Bitcoin Core, so I moved it back from trash but no joy, same error message.
It seems that it does not have the privilege to write on settings.json.tmp when trying to open Bitcoin core. You might need to run the Bitcoin core as administrator or it requires ROOT privileges.
Can you try to open Bitcoin core with the sudo command or run it as a root?
Open the terminal and try this command below
sudo "\file path from hard drive to application. app/Contents/MacOS/application name"
Other ways to run apps in root privilege can be found
here.
OK I am able to run it this way thanks! But if I quit and try to start normally it throws same error. How can I fix this? I don't want to download whole thing and then have to do it again for some reason.
BTW I see this message in Terminal:
users-iMac:~ admin$ sudo /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt.app/Contents/MacOS/Bitcoin-Qt
: You need to rebuild the database using -reindex to go back to unpruned mode. This will redownload the entire blockchain.
Please restart with -reindex or -reindex-chainstate to recover.