user "nobody" owns my files

poorfool · #1 February 9th, 2009, 01:44 PM

I have no acces anymore to some of my folders/files. The user who has acces now is called "nobody".

When I get info on a folder It's still possible to change the owner to my own user account, but i have to manually do this for all subfolders, "apply settings to enclosed items" does not seem to work..

Anybody any idea where this mr Nobody comes from, and how I can get rid of him permanently? It gives me the impression that my mac is hacked by an alien or something.

mac mini 2ghz intel core duo - macosx 10.5.5

**Giaguara** · #2 February 9th, 2009, 04:15 PM

What files are those? (ie. files in your home folder, files copied from a network or another drive, files from another user, from system etc) the location of those files matters.
Were they touched or copied by any other user e.g. with remote access or come via dropbox?
Was anything done to change the access manually?

You could chown those files but it'd first make sense to understand why the owner is what it is.

poorfool · #3 February 9th, 2009, 06:47 PM

In fact it's not my mac mini, but a mac mini of a colleague of me. In fact I am the only one in the office who is a little bit nerdy with mac's and pc's ;-).
These files are old archive files in a folder on the desktop, with many many subfolders. In the past there were no problems at all with these files. The only reason I can imagine is that I installed "logmein", a remote acces solution (www.logmein.com)

poorfool · #4 February 11th, 2009, 06:10 PM

so, what is the solution? anybody?

**Giaguara** · #5 February 12th, 2009, 01:18 AM

chown -R newowner pathto/those/files/foldername

Should be the easiest to own them recursively.
Replace newowner with the ones you want to own the files (shortname) and you can drag the files from Finder window to terminal to complete the path to foldername.

artov · #6 February 12th, 2009, 02:18 PM

Apache webserver is set by default so, that its files (configuration etc.) are owned by user "nobody".

poorfool · #7 February 12th, 2009, 06:18 PM

thx guys, i solved the problem, ... just funny that the empty folders in the path are still inaccesible, but that's not really a problem...
also still wondering where the problem came from.. is there a relation between apache webserver and logmein?

anyway thx a lot!

poorfool · #8 February 14th, 2009, 06:05 PM

hi again,

it seems that I was too fast crying victory...

there are still some subfolders that I can not change the owner. When I try to chown them in terminal I get the messages: permission denied and operation not permitted..

:-o