How to unlock a locked read-only .txt

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Level 1

8 points

How to unlock a locked read-only .txt

On my Macbook Pro I'm trying to edit a .txt file inside a device/external hard drive(it's under the Devices tab in finder) I've tried get info, looked under general and the Locked box was unchecked, I looked under Sharing & Permissions and under Privilege it says Read & Write by my name, but it also says You can only read under the tab. I open the .txt file and I click the unlock option, and a message comes up and says: The file "Plugins.txt" is on a read-only volume and cannot be unlocked. Is there any way I can fix this to edit the file?

Mac Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Feb 9, 2013 7:50 PM

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Answer 1

ds store

Level 7

30,855 points

Feb 9, 2013 8:00 PM in response to S3rL

If you can highlight and copy the text, just paste it elsewhere.

If you command shift 4 and draw a marquee around the text and click, it make png image file on the desktop, which you can use Preview to change it to jpg.

There are free optical character reader softwares over at MacUpdate.com that then can convert the image text into regular plain ASCII text to paste into any program you please.

Since your running 10.8, you first have to System Preferences > Security > set downloads to "Anywhere" to accept software from sources you trust.

You can try opening the file with the free TextWrangler, or saving the above text into a the same named file with same extension.

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Answer 2

Feb 9, 2013 8:00 PM in response to S3rL

Was the external drive originally formatted for a Windows machine? OS X can't write to NTFS (Windows) partitions, though it can read them. You can copy the file to your local drive and then edit it.

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Answer 3

S3rL Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 9, 2013 8:14 PM in response to ds store

Here's the tricky bit: I need to edit the .txt file while it's in the external drive, because I've tried making a copy and dragging it into the drive but it doesn't transfer.

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