Strange User Permissions/Group OS X Lion

OK, so after upgrading to Lion on 2 different MBPs (mine and my wife's) that have been around since Tiger, I too was aflicted by the "fethcing" permissions problem in my home account, similar to what's being reported here by many users. I see no such problems on our Mac Mini that started with Leopard.

On my MBP, my user account is a standard (non-admin) account. In any case, I used the Lion recovery tool to reset my home folder permissions as described here. It initially appeared to fix the problem for my home directory in that fetching is now gone. However, all my connected external drives (including my TimeMachine backup drive) still show some other group that is "fetching" with read and write access. In any case, after the reset, the permissions on the home folder now show as follows:

which seems OK, although I'm suspicious of the "You have custom access" statement. Now also, all folders within my home directory only show me (bhr) as a user, with read and write permissions, and a single group called "everyone" with no access permissions, as shown here for my downloads folder:

Now, what is even more strange is that if I download from the internet e.g. a disk image of software I'd like to install, the .dmg file shows up in my downloads folder as having the following permissions:

But when I expand the .dmg, the actual .app file now exhibits the fetching problem again:

which leads to the following error message when I try to copy/install the file into my applications folder:

I am able to circumvent the inability to install things by logging in as an admin user, but needless to say this problem is very frustrating, and in my case at least, certainly not solved by resetting the home folder permissions using the Lion recovery tool.

After being frustrated that the reset of home directory permissions using the Lion recovery tool did not solve my problem as in my post above, while searching for help I found this article by Tohper Kessler at CNET:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20121641-263/file-group-permissions-constan tly-displaying-fetching..-in-os-x/?tag=mncol

He suggests using the following terminal command in order to make sure the right group is associated with the user account:

sudo dscl . -append /Groups/GROUPNAME GroupMembership `whoami`

to be followed by resetting the home folder permissions. In the case of my standard user account GROUPNAME in the commannd is to be replaced with "staff".

So anyway, when I tried using the terminal command above, I recieved a message that "username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported."

I am at a loss as to what to do now. Does anyone have any further suggestions?

Take a look at: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3239302?answerId=16778639022#16778639022

"I repaired User account permissions using the Reset Password utility in the Lion Recovery Partition. This is different than Repair Permissions using Disk Utility.

Good description of how to do this here:"

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/how_to_resolve_user-level_permissions_iss ues_mac_os_x/

after upgrading to Lion on 2 different MBPs (mine and my wife's) that have been around since Tiger, I too was aflicted by the "fethcing" permissions problem in my home account

Exactly how were you "afflicted?' How did this problem actually impact your system before you tried to fix it?

Earlier in this thread, I posted the following:

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I think its important to understand that seeing "Fetching" in Get Info is a symptom, not a unique problem in itself - it means that the system can't find an appropriate username or group name to display. There can be a number of different causes of this, some serious and some not. As mentioned, one such cause is an old Tiger account that has been migrated to Lion. In that particular case, I'm not convinced that seeing "Fetching" is a sign of a serious functional problem. The files and folders themselves seem OK - when you look in Terminal, their group names are displayed correctly.

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User accounts that originated with Tiger have always had their own private group as the primary GID, and when you look in Terminal there has been no change in their user file permissions when these files are migrated to Leopard, to Snow Leopard, and also to Lion. I think the "Fetching" display in Lion's Get Info does reflect a Lion bug that hopefully will be fixed before long, but I am not convinced in the particular case of a Tiger migration that it causes significant operating problems. I haven't myself experienced any, and I think some of the issues described elsewhere in this thread are not really attributable to the leftover Tiger group. I don't doubt that there can be more serious issues that can also cause "Fetching" to display in Get Info, but again, seeing "Fetching" does not have a single cause.

My own suggestion for people with Tiger-originated accounts who are seeing "Fetching" for the group in Get Info but who are not having any actual operating problems is not to do anything at all for now, and to wait for Apple to eventually fix things. User permissions are easy to screw up when you start messing with them.

when I tried using the terminal command above, I recieved a message that "username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported."

Are you running this from an admin account? Standard users can't run sudo commands.

Thanks jsd2. As I described using the screenshots in my post above, one affliction I've been experiencing is that e.g. I cannot install software downloaded into my downloads folder on this user account becuase after mounting any disk images I've downloaded, the permissions on the actual files within the mounted image shows "fetching", which seems to prevent copying. This happens even though the permissions shown for the .dmg itself appear to be correct. I think it's related to the fact there is no group shown for my downloads folder (or any other folder within my home folder). My user account is a standard account which, as you say, explains why I could not run the sudo command.

I can of course work around this problem by logging in as an admin user whenever I need to do any software installations, so it's a hassle more than anything. I haven't noticed any other problems worth worrying about.

I think it's related to the fact there is no group shown for my downloads folder (or any other folder within my home folder).

If you mean just the main subfolders, then those folders are probably normal - the Get Info window doesn't give a complete picture of the ownership/permissions of an item. The Downloads folder permissions and those and those of the other main pre-supplied user folders (Documents, Music, etc) are normally read-write for the owner, and "no access" for the group and for others, and in that situation Lion's Get Info window apparently doesn't show the group permission separately. I just created a brand-new user account named "testuser" which doesn't have the "fetching" issue since it was not migrated from Tiger - the primary group is "staff" without having to correct anything. The Get Info windows on the Home folder and on the Downloads folder of this "normal" user account are identical to those you posted

When you look in Terminal, the group owner for Downloads is still staff, though it doesn't show up in the Get Info window:

$ ls -ld ~/Downloads

drwx------+ 6 testuser staff 204 Nov 19 12:37 /Users/testuser/Downloads

By contrast, a folder that you create yourself will be not be "no access" for group and others, and all three permissions should appear in Get Info.

.

one affliction I've been experiencing is that e.g. I cannot install software downloaded into my downloads folder on this user account becuase after mounting any disk images I've downloaded, the permissions on the actual files within the mounted image shows "fetching", which seems to prevent copying.

I wouldn't automatically assume the "because." I don't myself see this problem. I have a standard account "j" migrated from Tiger, which also shows "Fetching" on an app contained within a downloaded .dmg:

.

When I drag this app into the /Applications folder I get a window asking for authentication by an admin user since "j" is a standard account, and after I authenticate the app gets installed normally.

Had you tried to install applications from this account before you attempted to change the user permissions?

OK thanks jsd2. So I believe you now that the permissions on my home folder, and folders within it, whether pre-supplied or created by me, may be behaving normally and may not be the cause of the problem I'm experiencing.

Until recently, I was always able to install applications from this standard user account, after authenticating with an admin user/pwd, just as you say. I don't know what caused this problem to appear, but I definately had not messed with permissions at all before it first started.

In any case, now, after authenticating, I get the error message I posted in the screenshot previously ("...some items had to be skipped...") and the copy fails. I suppose you may be right and it may not be related at all to the "fetching" permissions issue, but it is what first caught my attention when I started troubleshooting the problem. I should note that I've tried several downloaded .dmg files and they all produce the same behavior. As I also said, they install fine if I'm logged into an admin account, and even from this user account if I set up up with Admin rights in System Preferences (after reboot). But as soon as I turn the user account back into a standard account (after reboot), the error message returns and I cannot copy the files.

In any case, now, after authenticating, I get the error message I posted in the screenshot previously ("...some items had to be skipped...") and the copy fails.

You can get that message if the /Applications folder already contains an earlier version of the same app, and that earlier version had been installed by a different user. If that's your situation, then rather than trying to directly replace the earlier version, delete it first instead. If that's not the issue then I don't know what the problem is - as I said, I don't see it in my system despite the "fetching" displayed in Get Info.

In any event, at least you can work around it.

Well that explains it then. I tried deleting the previously installed application before running the installer and it worked fine. I don't know why it thinks my applications were installed by a different user since my user accounts have not changed, although these applications were undoubtedly installed under Snow Leopard, before I switched to Lion. Anyway, I'm going to ignore "fetching" for now, as you suggest, since I have no other issues. I sure appreciate your help jsd2.

Glad to help, and it's interesting to see another "not guilty" verdict for the particular "Fetching" issue that is seen with Tiger-created user accounts.

There can be other reasons for seeing "Fetching" in a Get Info window, but the co-existence of this particular "Fetching" issue together with an actual operational permissions problem seems to be generally "true, true, unrelated" rather than "cause and effect". And if one isn't having any operational problems, I continue to feel that it's best to do nothing at all, and to wait for Apple to deal with this bug. User permissions are more complicated than they appear to be, and it's easy to muck them up.

User permissions are more complicated than they appear to be, and it's easy to muck them up.

Have to agree. I've been reading this thread but intend to do nothing. I haven't seen anything go really wrong on my system or at least certainly nothing that can be directly attributed to "fetching".

It's strange, and annoying, and makes me long for the days of OS9 where things were more open (no permissions), but in this age one needs the walls OSX has added.

Ultimately, I may rebuild my system from scratch without Migration Assistant, and only add back on the programs on the computer that I actually use and copy my files over - for a true "Clean Install". There's likely a lot of cobwebs in the sytem from many migrations, that would go away and help improve overall performance immensely I suspect.

Whether or not this “Fetching” bug has anything to do with the issues I've experienced in TextEdit and Preview (and a few other apps) on my computer remains to be seen. (I tried the fixes for Preview and TextEdit in Lion from other posts to no avail).

Also, I’ve been experiencing trouble quitting certain applications from the very beginning. (I started using my Lion based computer from scratch about 2 months ago and it has been experiencing the “Fetching” issue from the very start.

Overall, it’s pretty unsettling to have a permissions issue like this going on for such a long time without an official fix from Apple. I certainly hope they come up with one soon and create a KB file to go with it.

I've just experienced this on Lion with accounts that were created back in the Tiger days. I tried many of the suggestions in this thread to no avail. Adding the GroupMembership property to the primary group didn't work.

The only thing that eventually worked for me was to boot into the Lion Recovery Disk and reset account permissions. The problem there was that resetting account permissions reset the group membership for my files to "staff". I then had to go to System Prefernces / Users and Groups and then set the default group for my my user account to "staff". A lot of work, but the Fetching behavior stopped.

I had a couple of other accounts on the system, also created on Tiger, and also exhibiting the same "Fetching" behavior. Suspecting something funny with the groups like others in this thread, I poked around a bit with dscl to see what the differeces were in group attributes between the accounts that worked fine (mine and my sysadmin account created under SnowLeopard) and the others.

One thing I noticed is that the groups for the broken accounts had no RealName property. The 'staff' group and all the other system created groups did.

So I tried the following for one of the broken users (to protect the innocent, say that user was named 'fred' whose primary group was 'fred'):

• Loggee in as an administrator
• Checked to see that the group 'fred' has no RealName property:

sudo dscl . -read /Groups/fred

If the RealName property didn't exist (which it didn't for groups associated with accounts from Tiger), I ran the following:

sudo dscl . -append /Groups/fred RealName Fred

Logged back in as fred

I then discovered - no more "Fetching..."

Had 3 broken accounts. Worked successfully 3 out of 3 times.

Message was edited by: PERockwell Corrected second dscl command to reflect proper username

Hey all,

I noticed this same problem earlier today, and I think I have a solution.

I opened of Directory Utility (/System/Library/CoreServices/Directory Utility.app), went to Directory Editor, and browsed the groups and the only username for the staff group was root.

I re-added my account, and things seem to be getting better. Some folders seem to have odd permissions, but recreating, copying, and deleting the original seems to work. Also, no more "Fetching" error.

Good luck.

The problem is that an upgrade to Lion may leave some of your files' permission still attached to an old user or group that doesn't exist on your new system. This leads to the "Fetching..." error. This can pose big problems if the files in question are, say, an Aperture library, which will refuse to touch such files.

There's a simple solution in the Terminal. You can search for files that have 'nouser' and 'nogroup' and reset their ownership to your account.

I will assume your account is an administrator.

$ sudo find . -nogroup -print -exec chown myname:staff {} \;

Insert your own account's shortname where it says myname, e.g. 'steve', 'admin', etc. Executing this command will reset permissions for all files in the current directory and those beneath it in the folder hierarchy so 'cd' to the appropriate folder before executing.