Similarly, if an application-from Apple or a third-party developer-needs access to a particular file or folder to function, and the permissions on that item have changed in a way that prevents such access, the application may not function properly (or at all). For example, you may have trouble logging in to your account, printing, launching applications, or even starting up your Mac.
If permissions on particular files are “incorrect”-i.e., not what Mac OS X expects them to be or not what they need to be for your Mac’s normal operation-you can experience problems when the operating system tries to access or modify those files. Why is it necessary to repair permissions? (In Mac OS X 10.3 and later, repairing permissions also performs one other, unrelated, task: If the invisible /tmp symbolic link-which is linked to the /private/tmp directory-is missing, the link will be recreated.) The Repair Disk Permissions function-the process that actually performs the task of repairing permissions-examines certain files and folders on your Mac’s hard drive to see if their current permissions settings are what Mac OS X expects them to be if discrepancies are found, the offending permissions are changed to match the expected settings. But permissions also determine which items the operating system-or specific parts of it-can access and modify, and which files are accessible by applications. For example, permissions dictate whether or not a particular user can open and edit a particular file. What on earth has Permissions to do with viruses?Įvery file and folder on a Mac OS X hard drive has a set of permissions-settings that determine which user(s) have access to each item, and exactly what that access is. A member of the group had read.Īnd I get tired of posters stating that nonsense. | | all other users not in first two typesīefore the user had read & write. Poster rccharles has provided this description of what it all means:
This is because an update to Leopard changed the location of a number of system components. Using 'should be -rw-r-r-, they are lrw-r-r-' as an example, you will see the that the permissions are not changed, but the | indicates a different location. Permissions you can ignore on 10.5 and 10.6: You can ignore the various statements in the report: So I thought I would pre-empt another thread!Īs long as the report ends up with 'Permissions repair complete' then, as far as permissions go, you are fine. When you repair permissions in Snow Leopard you may see some rather strange messages.