How do I add permissions for "System" and "Staff"?
The title.
Unibody MacBook, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
do you want to tell us more? add permissions to what and why?
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3 replies
When sharing folders or setting permissions for folders, you have 'Staff' on the default public folders. If you delete this, however, you can no longer add 'Staff' like it was, and you would instead have to add all the users of the computer individually instead. Same goes for 'System'. A few folders on the computer can only be changed through 'System' profile - which basically means you need an admin password to change anything - but there is no visible way to manually set that option.
Qi_Willious wrote:
When sharing folders or setting permissions for folders, you have 'Staff' on the default public folders. If you delete this, however, you can no longer add 'Staff' like it was, and you would instead have to add all the users of the computer individually instead. Same goes for 'System'. A few folders on the computer can only be changed through 'System' profile - which basically means you need an admin password to change anything - but there is no visible way to manually set that option.
ok, let's take this one thing at a time. to change permissions to "system"(=root) on anything you definitely need admin password. that's how it should be. but there should normally be no reason to add "system" as a user to anything. why would you want to? and you should certainly not delete "system" from any folder. any system folder owned by "system" should stay that way. don't try to change that. you can break your system.
as for deleting "staff" from permissions via GUI and not being able to change it back, that's a bug and/or very poor design. I can't really say which.
staff is the default group that contains every user with an account on the computer.
I'm not sure why "staff" is not offered as an option when you try to add permissions to groups. worse, if you remove staff from permissions on an item, the group fro that item changes from staff to wheel to which no user except root belongs to. you don't see it in GUI because access is set to 0 when but the group ownership definitely changes as can be seen from terminal.
bottom line. DO NOT remove staff from ownership panel. why were you doing it anyway?
the only way to give staff back permissions to something you need to do it from terminal. no other way to do it unless you want to use 3rd party software.
if you removed staff from something and want to put it back run these commands
in terminal
sudo chgrp staff path/to/item
sudo chmod gr,X path/to/item
you''l have to put the correct unix path to the item in question in the command. also, you'll have to enter your admin password (which you won't see). that's normal.
How do I add permissions for "System" and "Staff"?