Removing stubborn files using Terminal not permitted

Zurarczurx wrote:

I talked to a couple of ex-colleagues about this and they are also stumped. When you fix it please could you come back and tell us how. Good luck.

I found a solution, if not a reason...

The command:

ls -lO@d /Library/Preferences/Tablet

Gives me:

drwxrwxr-x@ 2 root admin restricted 64 7 Jan 20:37 /Library/Preferences/Tablet

The trailing "@" after the permissions indicate "Extended attributes".

This seems to mean that they are particularly protected by the system. I guess this is due to a slightly borked migration from the TimeMachine.

The solution was to: 

Boot into Recovery mode. This seems to give additional rights to the Terminal...

Use the < csrutil disable > command in Terminal

Reboot to a normal account

Remove the directories by conventional means. I just used the Finder…

Reboot to Recovery and use < csrutil enable > in Terminal

Reboot as normal.

I haven't tried reinstalling the Wacom driver as I've decided to replace it with a Huion but at least I managed to delete those stubborn files...

Thanks for your help! :-)