Placement of folders

parkov

Registered
My folders in Macintosh HD are neat and orderly, except for my Utilities folder, which I have to scroll way way way down to get to. I bring it up with the rest of the folders, clean up, and they're all tidy, but whenever I restart my computer, the Utilities folder ends up going way back down there again. Does anyone have any idea why this is?
 
I mean that in my finder window, I clean up the folders, but it always reverts back to being messy when I restart.
 
This sounds very similar to a situation I had (have?) with my set-up (10.1.2). The root level of my system partition (System, Applications, Users etc.) wouldn't remember icon placement-every time I cleaned it up and neatly lined up the folders, they would not remain in place following a restart.

It occured to me that the settings for the directory layout were not being saved properly and it might be a permissions problem. To test this I activated the root account, logged on as root and lined up the icons. Just to be sure I also set a nice background tint to the window. Logging back in as Admin, the icons were now properly lined up and the tint was in place. All very good.

So I'm guessing I was right with it being a permission thing, but is this normal behaviour? Should I as Admin be able to change the windows settings for the root of the system volume or is this only something that 'root' can do? Where are the window settings stored and what permissions should be set on them?
 
Yes, this is a permissions problem. The thing is, though, that I've corrected the permissions myself and the problem doesn't go away sometimes, so it seems like Mac OS X likes to revert to the problematic permissions. The file that's causing the problem is, I believe, .DS_Store . It's an invisible file, so the best way to change permissions/owner is through the command line.

Just so you know, YOU should be the owner, and you should at least have full access to the file. The way to change this is to issue the command sudo chown yourusername pathtofile in the Terminal. Then issue the command sudo chmod 666 pathtofile. This is how most of my .DS_Store files are setup.

I believe if you do a search in these forums, someone showed a way on how to do this recursively so it fixes the problem for all of your .DS_Store files. But usually not all of them are a problem, so you can just use this to fix the ones that are.
 
JEM, that is exactly the problem I was trying to explain.

And...

simX, that solved the problem.

Thanks to both of you.
 
Many thanks simX, I've just noticed it's also doing the same thing on another directory. I'll try changing the permissions and see what happens.
 
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