Asks for password when moving apps!

Well, if you are patient a bit more, perhaps Siri will be opening the apps and the files that you want when you ask her to do so. Star Trek becomes reality, as Siri appears to be the future user interface for Apple. As a seed tester, that is my guess.

I'd be happy with that!

Probing with

ls -l /Applications/

reveals that each Apple app that, according to Lion, "can't be modified or deleted because it's required by Mac OS X" is owned by root and belongs to group 'wheel'.

Then a reasonable way to move such apps to sub-folders of /Applications would seem to be first to uses the chown command in Terminal to change their ownership to my [user]:admin, where by [user] I mean my username. (I'm a member of group admin.)

Now the question changes to: what repercussions might that have? And should I change ownership back to root and group 'wheel' after moving the apps?

Then I recommend that you take an idea from seed testers and create a test partition or ext boot drive and give your ideas a go.

I was rather hoping that, with Lion already having been out for slightly more than 6 months, others would have already addressed this problem.

It is my understanding that Path Finder is a Finder substitute that allows you to do many of the things that you wish to do. You can supposedly even permanently substitute it for the Finder in Mac OS X. It may be worth looking into and if you like it buy it.

http://cocoatech.com/

Dah•veed wrote:

It is my understanding that Path Finder is a Finder substitute that allows you to do many of the things that you wish to do...

Would Path Finder permit file operations that the OS itself prohibits??

OK, I'll try to go along with the way Apple wants us to do things. Because I had already moved a few Apple apps to subfolders of /Applications, to get all the apps provided by the OS into the top level of /Applications, I just reinstalled Lion from the Recovery Partition. Now all those apps are in /Applications .

However, the copies I had succeeded in moving into sub-folders of /Applications before are still there. This is the case, e.g., with Activity Monitor.app. I need to delete the version of it that's in /Applications/Utilities. How?

I tried two obvious things, neither of which works:

1. Using Command-I, change the Sharing & Permissions so that 'everyone' has Read & Write permission. Then try Command-Delete. Get "Trash" pop-up window saying "Activity Monitor.app' can't be modified or deleted because it's required by Mac OS X.
2. In Terminal, where first doing ls -l on the file shows permissions/ownership as drwxr-xr-x 8 root wheel, I then do: chown -R user:admin "Activity Monitor.app". (The -R was because the app is in fact a package.) But I get "Operation not permitted" error.

How to proceed to get rid of that copy in the sub-folder?

I do not really know anything about Path Finder. I have just downloaded it and will be giving it a test drive with the 30 days of free trial. There are also a number of videos that explain what it can do and also tutorials about using PF on the website linked above.

You have me there. I have never messed with the Apps folder. Being a seed tester, I use the OS as Apple designed it to find the issues and make bug reports, as well as enhancement requests, so I have never gotten myself into those types of corners! 😉