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Using "Apply to Enclosed Items" on a Home folder

The "Apply to Enclosed items" feature in the Sharing & Permissions" section of a Get Info window can have undesired consequences when applied to a home folder or one of its system-supplied subfolders (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, etc). This issue seems to come up a lot, and so I thought I would share some recent testing that I've done.


Apple has an earlier Leopard support article about this issue:

Mac OS X 10.5: Renaming or saving after using "Apply to enclosed items" on a Home folder


I've tried to explore this on my own dual-boot Snow Leopard-Lion setup, using a newly-created admin account on both systems for testing. Here are my results:


In both Lion and Snow Leopard, the home folder and its main subfolders carry an "everyone deny delete" ACL, a custom permission that does not show up in the Get Info window.


In Lion, but not in Snow Leopard, using "Apply to enclosed items" on the home folder propagates that "everyone deny delete" ACL onto the contained user data files and folders. There is no outward sign that this has happened, but if you then try to rename or Trash one of your user files or folders, you will need to authenticate your action with your admin password. This is clearly undesirable.


Once this happens, you cannot recover just by running the "Reset Home Folder Permssions and ACLs" utility that is on the Recovery HD. This will not remove the unwanted ACLs that are on the user-created items. The Terminal command "chmod -RN ~" will remove the unwanted ACLs, but will also remove the original desired ACLs on the home folder itself and on its main subfolders. When I ran this command I also received the error message "chmod: Failed to clear ACL on file ubiquity.socket: Invalid argument," This didn't seem to matter - the command still cleared the other ACLs properly.


THe recovery strategy of first running "chmod -RN ~", and then running the "Reset Home Folder Permissions and ACLs" utility on the Recovery HD seemed to work well. Except for the location of the utility program, this is equivalent to Apple's recommended procedure in the Leopard support article mentioned above. That article advised using sudo chmod -RN ~; I did not need the sudo.


At least in my system, Snow Leopard seemed to have a safeguard that was missing in Lion - as mentioned, in my Snow Leopard system the ACL on the home folder did not get propagated to the contained user items after using the "Apply to enclosed items" feature.


If anyone has done some testing and gotten different results from the above, please post details.


My own view is that to avoid all these issues a safe rule would be not to use "Apply to enclosed items" on any folder that you did not create yourself.

Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.6.8), dual-boot Lion OS X 10.7.2

Posted on Dec 18, 2011 7:23 AM

Reply
15 replies

Dec 18, 2011 7:33 AM in response to jsd2

My own view is that to avoid all these issues a safe rule would be not to use "Apply to enclosed items" on any folder that you did not create yourself.

That has been my view for a long time. I'm pretty sure the ACLs were propagated at some point in Snow Leopard's history, also. Perhaps they fixed it with one of the updates along the way.


Your method of cleaning up the home folder is also documented in a MacFixIt - CNET article going back to Leopard. I had thought I found it on Apple's support pages, too, but have never found it again, so I always refer people to the MacFixIt page with the caveat that you can use the Snow Leopard and now Lion Recovery partition the same way as it describes. I can now point people to your post instead.


Thanks for putting the time into researching this.

Dec 18, 2011 8:55 AM in response to jsd2

As I recall, there was a bit of carnage when people were moving from Tiger (ACL's optional) to Leopard (ACL's enabled), since the "Apply to enclosed items" was used a bit before ACL's were the norm.


I don't use "Apply to enclosed items" on system created folders, so I also hadn't noticed this throwback behavior before (confirmed on my system as well) - there really needs to be a decent GUI utility included for managing ACL's (I wind up referring people to TinkerTool System a lot, since Sandbox hasn't been updated in quite a while). You can also use the following from the Terminal for restoring the default ACL's after removing all of them with chmod -RN ~:


chmod +a "everyone deny delete" ~/ ~/Desktop ~/Documents ~/Downloads ~/Library ~/Movies ~/Music ~/Pictures ~/Public ~/Sites

Jan 31, 2012 7:43 PM in response to jsd2

I foolishly clicked "Apply Permissions to Eclosed Items" for a folder on my external hard drive, and now when I view that folder in Finder, all of the files are missing...the sub-folders are all still there, but they are empty as well.


I have not been able to find any help on how to fix this, do you have any idea how I can go about resetting the permissions for a folder on an external hard drive??


Thank You!

Feb 1, 2012 4:30 AM in response to cbriggsby

On an external data drive, Apply to Enclosed is not a problem. What you've apparently done is prevent yourself from reading the data.

If you don't need permissions on the external, then if you Get Info on it, you can check the box to ignore permissions on that drive. It is down with the sharing and permission settings.


What are the permissions on that folder?

Feb 1, 2012 5:59 PM in response to Barney-15E

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Feb 3, 2012 10:15 AM in response to Barney-15E

So I was not able to repair the drive, however all of the missing files were visible/accessable on the windows machine. Lacking any additional ideas, I decided it easiest to just move all of the files off of my external, and then back on (into a new folder). Simply moving the files within my external did not solve the problem, for whatever reason I had to physically move them off of the drive and then back on.


Not the solution I was looking for (quite time comsuming), but in the end it worked so guess I shouldn't complain.

May 9, 2012 6:09 PM in response to jsd2

It looks like this was finally fixed in the Lion OS X 10.7.4 software update.


According to the newly posted support article below, not only will using "Apply to Enclosed items.. " on a Home folder no longer cause the described permissions problems as it did in earlier versions of Lion, but in fact re-running that feature in 10.7.4 or later will now fix such problems:


OS X Lion: After "Apply to enclosed items…", unable to change prefs, remove or save files, iPhoto & iTunes issues, Preview & TextEdit quit

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4040

Using "Apply to Enclosed Items" on a Home folder

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