Why is Mountain Lion asking for my password to delete files?

Then what can one do to prevent needing to restart after initial start does not connect to internet, or as the computer slows down... or the problem with the trash which i can't seem to resolve... Is there anything that will clean up the computer?

cityhermit wrote:

I don't know, nothing seems to work. Are you saying just to replace the second username with my username or both? (I did the second only and got invalid argument). Also, this is different than the one that was earlier in this line...

You substitute your username everywhere it appears in those two commands. So if it was freddy, the first command would be

sudo chown -R freddy:staff /Users/freddy/.Trash

I didn't think it would happen - but that fixed it! Thanks. (I wish I could see how to give the 10 point check...)

Now does anyone have an idea regarding just general cleanup, particularly re speed, having to restart... or would that question go in a different line, I guess.

There you go. Using the Terminal is an exact science. Don't worru about the points, I've enough. For speeding things up, see:

Mac Maintenance Quick Assist,
Mac OS X speed FAQ,
Speeding up Macs,
How to Speed up Macs,
Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance,
Mac troubleshooting: What to do when your computer is too slow,
Essential Mac Maintenance: Get set up,
Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines,
Maintaining OS X,
Five Mac maintenance myths and
Myths of required versus not required maintenance for Mac OS X for information.

This all seems a bit complicated... Maybe I can simply ask how one might solve the problems of very slow startup time, especially re Mail coming down and the Internet becoming ready to access. If there is a simple fix.

How do you do a terminal command?

I had this and check that my .Trash was owned by root, in fact, everytime I delete something the Trash can look empry all the time. This is what I did and works:

Open Terminal and type:

sudo chown -R your-username .Trash/

wher 'your-username' is your user name.

To know your user name just type the command: whoami

Or, if you want to do everything in one single line:

sudo chown -R `whoami` .Trash/

Everytime you use the command sudo the system will ask the root password. If you don't know it, use your password.

Johandry wrote:

Everytime you use the command sudo the system will ask the root password. If you don't know it, use your password.

No, it doens't want the root password, which few if any people need to enable. It's asking for your user's admin password. BTW, Once provided, you can run sudo w/o it for at least five minutes, the Terminal default time.

That's right, will not ask for root password, my bad. It will ask for your password which - as baltwo said - is the user admin password as your user is a sudoer.

@Dj Jean, to open terminal you may type cmd+space and type terminal. That's one of many ways to open it.

WORKED!!! Thanks.

Baltwo, I had the same problem that Kaelisan was having. I followed your instructions but once terminal told me to put my password in, It wouldnt let me! and I keep trying to put the password in but it'll just tell me "sorry, try again"

Help please!

Can I ask if anyone knows how to fix/speed up a slow MAC, especially Mailbox?

Then, you're not using your admin user password or trying from a nonadmin account. Step one is to log into a newly created admin user account and see if the problem persists.

Start your own thread and maybe someone will offer help, This one has no relationship to the original thread.

The terminal command line stuff might work, but I found this article to be the most helpful in actually explaining what to do and what is going on.

I solved this problem by booting into the recovery partition, resetting my admin account's password and resetting home directory permissions and ACLs.

See this:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57383188-263/what-to-do-when-the-os-x-finde r-requires-passwords-for-managing-files/