Hi, C! I don't have Tiger and don't know as much as LC, but if this is a one time deal, the unix way of changing permission from the command line is using chmod, chown, and chgrp as LC mentions...
If you are new to the command line, you should also know how to list your files and stuff, too. I'll go into detail for other folks in our listening audience, too. Here's some of the commands I wish someone would have told me when I first started on the command line...
ls -l
= list, long (which will show you permissions); leave off the -l for just names; you'll see something at the front of each file/folder that looks something like this...
drwxrwxrwx
think of this as d - rwx - rwx - rwx such that the 1st column is what type of file this is (d=directory, -=file, l=link, etc.) and then 3 sets of 3 which show read, write, and execute permissions for (1) the User/Owner, (2) the Group, and (3) Others
You can also look at this numerically where READ = 4, WRITE = 2, and EXECUTE =1 such that drwxrwxrwx is 777 (4
21=7 for User, and then the same for Group and Other), drwxr-xr-x is 755, drwxrw-r-- is 764, etc.
cd
= change directory; you can do this one directory at a time and go deeper and deeper or you can skip levels go directly deep by using paths
e.g.
cd Documents
cd Letters
cd Wozniak
or
cd Documents/Letters/Wozniak
To backup a directory, use .. such that from the Wozniak folder, if you want to go back to the Letters folder, you would type
cd ..
The long/true path to your Desktop would probably be something like /Users/myusername/Desktop
So if there were a folder called "messedup" on your desktop and you want to 'fix' its permissions, you could do something like this...
sudo chown -R mysername:mygroup /Users/myusername/Desktop/messedup/
sudo chmod -R 755 /Users/myusername/Desktop/messedup/
Or you could just navigate to the desktop and skip the long path stuff...
sudo chown -R myuserame messedup
sudo chmod -R 755 messedup
The -R notations are called flags and they allow you to specify additional options for unix commands. The -R means recursively so that it and everythng it contains will all have the same permissions. Notice that I also left off the :group option in the chown username:groupname command in the later examples.
And then, to find out more about a particular unix command, you can try to access its manual, e.g. man ls, man chmod, or man chown.
I find command line usage a necessity now, especially when something goes wrong. When everything goes right, you can ignore its there, but when it comes to fixing stuff, I often end up having to go to the command line anyway.
Good luck!
--ST
