getconf: confstr: DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR: Permission denied ???

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Level 1

12 points

getconf: confstr: DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR: Permission denied ???

Hello,

My installation of snow leopard has been having a variety of strange 'low level' issues, which appear to some degree to correlate to access problems to the user cache directories. Among other things, quicklook and the pubsub framework/agent are possibly affected by this.

What I just now realized is that the following command:
getconf DARWIN USER_CACHEDIR

elicits the following error message:
getconf: confstr: DARWIN USER_CACHEDIR: Permission denied

Note that with sudo this does work, but I would have thought that you should not need sudo to access a user's cache location??

Is this true, or is this how it should be? Any experiences with this?

Thanks!

MBP, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Dec 28, 2010 12:48 PM

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Answer 1

PeterWat

Level 1

9 points

Dec 28, 2010 1:22 PM in response to mac0nmbp

As a regular user, I don't get an error:

[host:~] user% getconf DARWIN USER_CACHEDIR
/var/folders/zz/zzzivhrRnAmviuee ++azk+7jw/-Caches-/

So it does sound like something's wrong. Does repairing permissions with Disk Utility help?

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Answer 2

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,667 points

Dec 28, 2010 1:41 PM in response to mac0nmbp

You shouldn't need root to run that command. Try running it as another (non-root) user, creating one if necessary. If it works, then your cache/temp directory has wrong permissions, in which case you'll have to find it and correct them. Another option would be to delete the entire contents of /var/folders (not /var/folders itself.) I haven't tried that myself and I don't know whether the contents would be recreated automatically on reboot. They should be.

If the command fails for all users, try repairing permissions in Disk Utility. As a last resort, reinstall.

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