Sufficient access privileges?

OK, this is driving me nuts. I upgraded to Leopard a month ago and all of a sudden I have lost privileges.

I had moved the local files from all of my web sites to the "Sites" folder under my user account. Yesterday, I was going to make a copy of one of the folder for one of the sites so I could do a redesign.

I copied the folder to my desktop and tried to rename it, but I go the following error message: "You do not have sufficient access privileges to rename the item 'Jan's Web Site.'"

Now, I am the administrator and this is MY account. I have walked my way up the directory up to "Users" folder, changing the file permissions to "Read & Write" for everyone and nothing changes. I still cannot change the name of that file.

Can someone help me regain control of my Mac?

Thanks in advance,

- Paul

Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Dec 9, 2007 12:57 AM

19 replies

Mar 28, 2008 1:34 PM in response to petrock

I tried resetting the ACLs on my user account using both the Leopard Installer "reset password" method and the chmod commands that petrock listed, and the chmod command that biovizier suggested. I still cannot rename a folder on my desktop, nor can I move it to the trash so I can delete it, even after entering my password, which Leopard insists on if I try to move it to the trash. In a terminal window at a bash prompt, if I try to "rm -rf <directory>" or "rmdir <directory>" (it's an empty directory), Leopard reports "Operation not permitted".

Any other suggestions?

Mar 28, 2008 2:40 PM in response to wscdancer

It looks like the root of the problem for me was that the Desktop folder/directory somehow got "locked". Once I noticed that (by comparing the directory structure on my iMac with that on my Macbook), and unlocked the Desktop folder on my iMac, then I was able to fix the permissions on files on the Desktop and was able to rename the folder I was previously unable to rename.

hce95

Level 1

20 points

Apr 2, 2008 5:05 AM in response to ringo67

Have you tried repairing permissions in Disk Utility?

Apr 5, 2008 9:16 AM in response to petrock

Petrock's method:

*sudo chmod -R +a "everyone deny delete" ~/*

*sudo chmod -R -a "everyone deny delete" ~/*

*sudo chmod +a "everyone deny delete" ~/ ~/Desktop ~/Documents ~/Downloads ~/Library ~/Movies ~/Music ~/Pictures ~/Public ~/Sites*

... works for me, although step #2 will fail if any files or folders are locked. Thus, you must unlock things first. Follow "solution #1" on this link to do so:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106237

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Sufficient access privileges?