xcode project file locked

OK: I'm an idiot... suddenly projects I'd been working on are locked. That is, the .xcodeproj file as seen in the "Groups & files" has a little lock on it. I'm not using SVN (afaik) and I really don't think I changed anything. Now when I quit a project, I get a nice little message telling me that nothing is going to be saved! AAACCCCKKK....!

I googled all over for an answer, with no luck at all. What's up?

Intel mac, Mac OS X (10.6.2), 8 gigs RAM

Posted on Jan 14, 2010 9:50 PM

Reply
3 replies

Jan 15, 2010 1:59 AM in response to Tracy Valleau

Hi Tracy -

Could you possibly be logged into your Mac as a different user? Are the projects on a readonly volume? Else did you recently run any scripts to "fix permissions"? Somehow it appears that all your .xcodeproj files suddenly became "Read only", which means either the file or volume permissions changed or your login changed.

If you know how to read Unix file permissions in Terminal, go into some of your project directories and see what the perms are on the files and the project directory itself.

Otherwise, start this way:
1) Ctrl-click on the locked icon in the Groups & Files tree, and select Reveal in Finder;
2) Ctrl-click on the file's icon in the Finder window, and select Get Info;
3) Expand the Sharing & Permissions panel at the bottom of the Info window;
4) Your login name should be the first line in the table which lists Name and Privilege;
5) If the Privilege setting for your Name is "Read only", locate the Lock icon in the bottom right corner of the panel;
6) Click on the Lock and enter the Admin. password when prompted;
7) The Lock icon should now change to Unlocked;
8) Click on "Read only" to the right of your Name, and select "Read & Write";
9) Click the Lock to close it;

You may need to close and reopen your project first, but after that the lock should be cleared.

Of course these steps will only unlock one file, and we don't know how many files will need to be unlocked, much less how they all came to be locked in the first place. But hopefully, something here will give you a clue that points in the right direction.

\- Ray

Jan 15, 2010 6:51 PM in response to RayNewbie

Hi Ray
Thanks for generously long reply. I'd thought of all that, and the file permissions were just fine. What I did do that fixed it was extensive: I uninstalled all my tools; reinstalled the DevTools; reinstalled the templates, and the projects finally "unlocked themselves."

I strongly suspect that something corrupted the templates that the projects were based on, and that somehow locked them. (That is, Xcode couldn't find a matching template, and so decided it didn' t know what to do, and decided to prevent any changes at all.)

That, however, is speculation. I spent about 6 hours on this, in an out of the terminal; rebooting; googling around; checking permissions... and finally just uninstalled and reinstalled.

I hate such brute-force solutions, because it leaves me not knowing what the issue really was.

Anyway: fixed. Thanks for your courtesy.

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xcode project file locked

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