What permissions should ~/Library/Preferences have?

I copied my entire home folder over from a backup and I've been having a variety of permissions issues. One that is particularly annoying is when I try to save any of my preferences in Mail, I get this response:

"Error Saving Preferences

Writing your preferences to disk has failed. Your preferences may not have been saved. The permissions on ~/Library/Preferences may be wrong or your disk may be full."

I checked the permissions on this folder through Finder and it shows I have read and write, so there must be something else going on behind the scene.

Anyone know what permissions this folder should have and how I would set them?

Thanks!

MBP C2D & Mac Mini 1.25ghz, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Jul 3, 2010 6:35 AM

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12 replies

Jul 3, 2010 8:37 AM in response to Dreadnought

This just gets more complicated... I just noticed that iTunes seemed to hang on "Syncing Contacts" with my iPhone so I removed Contacts from the iPhone sync options. Then the calendar syncing seemed to hang too so I just removed that as well. I'm willing to bet this is permissions related. Music seems to sync fine.

Any ideas on what permissions need to be (and where) to successfully sync contacts and calendar?

Thanks for the suggestions!

Jul 3, 2010 12:06 PM in response to Dreadnought

~/Library and ~/Library/Preferences should have:

owner:(you) - read and write
everyone - no access

better known as: chmod 700

Be sure you own the files in there as well

Sometimes, (rarely, for whatever reason), pref. files will get changed to root ownership

To correct ownership on all files in the ~/Library/Preferences directory,
open terminal, at the prompt:
sudo chown -R <your username>: ~/Library/Preferences
example (if short user name is "joe"):
sudo chown -R joe: ~/Library/Preferences

Jul 4, 2010 3:42 AM in response to KJK555

No dice... looks like I need to install everything from scratch. Can't save Mail preferences, create iTunes iPhone backups, sync tasks or calendars, etc. even after running sudo chown -R (my username): ~/Library/Preferences. I did copy my entire home folder over from an external hard drive as root when this all started, so maybe that's what screwed everything up?

Jul 4, 2010 5:48 AM in response to Dreadnought

[Here is a good MacFixIt article on resetting Home folder permissions correctly|http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10329971-263.html]. Apple has one also, but I can never find those articles. For the commands, just copy and paste them into your Terminal window so that you don't make a typo. The backticks (`) are important and are not regular apostrophes.

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What permissions should ~/Library/Preferences have?

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