Something Peculiar

J

jguidroz

Registered
Whenever I downloaded a program yesterday(Fire, Omniweb, OpenUp, etc) I could take the file and drop it in my applications folder. Now today when I tried to drop Macster b5.5 in there after installing it on my classic partition, it wouldn't allow me to do that. It said I didn't have permission to alter the applications folder. Is it because Macster isn't in package form like Fire, Omniweb and OpenUp were? That's the only thing I can think of.

 
A possible cause is that your Classic drive is formatted in HFS, not HFS+ (extended) : if this is the case, OS X does not recognize you as the owner of the file because HFS has no room to store ownership in the file reference.

Another possible cause is that you logged in as user#1 (I would guess : root# aka superuser) yesterday and today you are logged in as user#2 (I would guess your standard account). If this is the case, once again you get the UNIX complaint about you not having the rights to move the file since you are not recognized as the owner. (This time the formatting of the classic partition has no impact on the usability or not of the file.)

Keep us informed if you succeed in getting your file back !
 
Actually, every partition on my 20gb drive is HFS+. And I've never logged out or even restarted my computer since installing X yesterday morning, so I'm still logged in as the same person. Still perculiar eh?
 
I have one theory on this. I've restarted my machine, and I'm still locked out. The new version of Fire uses the installer program included in X, and I think this may have screwed around with the permissions. That's the only thing I can think of because I didn't have to drop Fire into Applications because it did it for me. And trying to drop a program in Applications afterwards received the "You aren't permitted to do this" message.
 
I emailed the developer of Fire, and it is indeed a bug in the installer program that changes the permissions on the Applications Folder.
 
If that application changed the ownership of your application menu, then you ought to be able to see that in the terminal window. I know there is a way to display ownership info on a folder in the terminal window, but I don't remember how... A gent or a lady will certainly tell us ;)
 
Originally posted by Pascal
If that application changed the ownership of your application menu, then you ought to be able to see that in the terminal window. I know there is a way to display ownership info on a folder in the terminal window, but I don't remember how... A gent or a lady will certainly tell us ;)
Click to expand...


try

ls -l


that will give you more info than a regular ls....

man ls

will give you more info about ls, so you can determine which configurations are best for you for ls

 
in a term window type :
ls - l
to list all the contents of the root directory

for more sophisticated users :
ls -l / | grep "App" (grep is a filter)
will produce :
drwxrwxr-x 14 root admin 432 Sep 29 18:32 Applications
 
oops

in a term window type :
ls - l / 
( read ell ess - ell slash )
or even l / ( ell slash )
to list all the contents of the root directory

 
One of the things I love the most with OS X is the Finder’s ability to let you easily edit file permissions. To own again the Apps folder, open an OS X session as root with you admin password, click on the Apps folder in the Finder, and open the Inspector (File > Show Inspector or Command+I). Choose Sharing in the popup menu and type your usual login name in the owner box and enable read-write in the little submenu to the right… Then hurry and log out to another session cause being root can be dangerous ;)
 
Thank you, Jean-Marie and Hendu : I'll add these info to my slowly growing understanding of Unix...

(which, of course, I wish I'll never ever have to use in the final version of OS X... ;))
 
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