Folder permissions change all by themselves (I swear!)

[ericmurphy]

I have two accounts on my OS X machine for my own use. One is "admin" and is an administrative account. The other one is "eric" and it's just a regular account, not an administrative account. I use this account when I'm doing regular production on the machine. I only log in as "admin" when I'm doing administrative stuff, like installing software.

Well, yesterday I was trying to install the latest version of "Fire," when I discovered my "admin" account didn't have "write" rights to the Applications folder! The rights went like this:

Owner: "System" rwx

Group: "Admin" r_x

Everyone r_x

Now, I'm reasonably positive I have never changed the privileges on the Applications folder. Why would I? I like the idea that I usually can't move or delete files in the Applications folder. But somehow, I lost administrative "write" rights to the folder anyway.

I ended up logging into the console as "root" and resetting the privileges. And even as "root" it wasn't easy; I had to keep selecting the Applications folder until I was finally able to change the privileges (most of the time the privileges buttons were greyed out). I suppose I could have set the permissions from the command line using su, but I was lazy. And regardless, this can't be taken as nominal behavior of the filesystem.

Has anyone else seen anything like this?

 

[AlanBDahl]

If a install program actually installs a program into your Applications folder it's possible that it may change the permissions of the folder in the process. This is a bug in the OSX install process and has been documented elsewhere in this forum. Programs that are installed by dragging and dropping from a disk image like Fire are fine, it's only those that use the actual Apple installer.

When it comes to changing permissions of system directories I usually use the command line but if you don't want to do it that way you can use Xtools which prompts you for the administrator password if needed so you don't have to change which user you are currently logged in as. Go to www.versiontracker.com to find it.

 

[ericmurphy]

Yep, that's all I did. I really prefer applications which you install just by dragging them into the Applications folder. So who knows what happened in this particular case. I can't absolutely rule out that I changed the permissions myself, but I really doubt it.

On the other hand, I seem to recall installing something a while ago that used the Apple installer. Maybe this was the first time I've tried to drag anything into the Applications folder since then...

I usually try to change permissions of things only when I'm their owner (seems like the safest way to do it). But in this instance, I had no choice, since the System is the owner of the Applications folder.

Originally posted by AlanBDahl
If a install program actually installs a program into your Applications folder it's possible that it may change the permissions of the folder in the process. This is a bug in the OSX install process and has been documented elsewhere in this forum. Programs that are installed by dragging and dropping from a disk image like Fire are fine, it's only those that use the actual Apple installer.

When it comes to changing permissions of system directories I usually use the command line but if you don't want to do it that way you can use Xtools which prompts you for the administrator password if needed so you don't have to change which user you are currently logged in as. Go to www.versiontracker.com to find it.