What is 'Permissions differ...'?

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Level 1

133 points

What is 'Permissions differ...'?

Of late I am facing some problems in my Mac's performance. I have had to resort to using Disk utility for gauging the status of the Mac's HD and on both occasions, I found that there was this problem which came up under 'verify disk permissions' : permissions differ...[see screenshot, if this could help in diagnosing what the problem is]:

Of late I have been going to different sites on the net such as news and You Tube and is this problem related to such internet related issues? I would like to be enlightened in this matter since I have not experienced this problem earlier.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5), garage band, FCPX:10.0.6 version

Posted on Nov 28, 2012 9:21 AM

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Answer 1

Klaus1

Level 9

52,879 points

Nov 28, 2012 9:49 AM in response to somanna

Whilst there is little point in using 'verify permissions' (you might as well go straight to 'repair permissions'), you can in fact ignore these messages:

As long as the report ends up with 'Permissions repair complete' then, as far as permissions go, you are fine. You can ignore the various statements in the report:

Permissions you can ignore on 10.5 onwards:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448

Using 'should be -rw-r--r-- , they are lrw-r--r--' as an example, you will see the that the permissions are not changed, but the | indicates a different location. This is because an update to Leopard onwards changed the location of a number of system components.

Poster rccharles has provided this description of what it all means:

drwxrwxrwx

d = directory

r = read

w = write

x = executeable program

drwxrwxrwx

| | |

| | all other users not in first two types

| |

| group

|

owner

a little more info

Before the user had read & write. A member of the group had read.

After, only the user had read & write.

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Answer 2

somanna Author

Level 1

133 points

Nov 28, 2012 4:06 PM in response to Klaus1

Thanks a lot Klaus for your reply. So this apparent malfunctioning of the Mac's HD is not a cause for concern and I just need to, with peace of mind, click on the repair permissions button and move ahead. Is this understanding of mine correct?

BTW, let me tell you why I had suspected my Mac's HD to be having some problem and why I had sought to use disk utility services: several months ago, I found gray line appear on my Mac during startup. I raised this matter in these forums: [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4040047?answerId=18744385022#18744385022]

Recently, when the gray line resurfaced after a great gap, I resorted to the services of disk utility and understood that there was a permissions related problem. This problem appears solved for now.

I guess that a stitch in time is better than 9 stitches made out of time!😁

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