Q: Help Clarifying Terminal Questions?

Ignore permissions errors.  They are normal.  The rest I would have to take time to read to give a good answer.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448 tells you which permissions may be ignored.  That gray curtain telling you to restart is either due to a directory, driver, or hardware issue.  See http://www.macmaps.com/kernelpanic.html about those gray screen telling you to restart errors.  Links to macmaps.com may give me compensation.

Ignore the repair permissions errors.  They never go away, and you will just drive yourself crazy trying to make them go away, or worse make your system unusable.

While running repair permissions may clean up some permission problems, especially after some 3rd party installer messed with some standard permissions, it is generally not that useful on a regular basis.

Besides repair permissions ONLY looks at a small subset of files, so it is not going to look at everything, nor even know what many files should be set to.

In Terminal when I type ls -l t lists me as drwx (d in this case is "directory" which means I have permission to rwx all the files in my main directory?) for most of them and the root as lrwx. The disk utility logfile lists the proposed changes to permissions for me without either an "l" (ell) or "d" in front...is this normal?

'l' and 'd' are NOT permissions, they are the type of file object.

l - symbolic link

d - directory

space - regular file

b - block device

c - character device

there are others, but they are just the ls commands way to hinting at the type of file object.

See "man ls", "man chmod" for more information about ls output and file permissions.

NOTE:  Be very VERY careful about changing permissions on ANY file not in your home directory tree, as you can very easily make your system unbootable.  If you want to play then I strongly suggest you have a recent full backup (a clone via SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner would allow the fastest restore after destroying your system).

I typed /etc/passwd and got the message back: "Permission Denied" without any options offered to login in under sudo.

At the command prompt disk you actually enter

/etc/passwd

Then of course you are going to get a permission error.  /etc/passwd is not an executable file, so it is execute permission bit is not set, so you get a permission error.  But even if you set its execute permission bit, it does not have code to execute, so it wouldn't anything useful if you tried to exeucte it.

However, if I'm just reading what you wrote wrong, and you really did

cat /etc/passwd

then I would expect that you would see the contents of the passwd file.  It is not protected from viewing.  However, NOT everthing on Mac OS X is kept in the passwd file.  For example your account is not listed there.  Mac OS X has other ways of managing user accounts.

And if I do have privileges as a sudo user, then why can I not access the /etc/passwd file?

Because you are using it wrong.

sudo cat /etc/passwd

But then again, since /etc/passwd is not normally restricted from viewing, you do not really need sudo anyway.

The basic form of sudo is

sudo command options arguments

where command is something that needs elevated privileges to run.

You are in the sudoers file because you are using an Admin account, which give you the right to use the sudo command, and through the sudo command you can elevate your privileges when executing commands.  But since you do not want to run around with elevated privileges all the time, you exeucted sudo on an as needed basis.

Do I need to first enable root in the directory utility in order to read that file and make any necessary adjustments to privileges?

You DO NOT need to enable root, and that is just an invitation for someone to try hacking into your system using a well known account so they only need to guess root's password, were as to get into your account they have to guess you name and password, which increases the difficulty.

Besides with the sudo command you can have all of root's privs without the hacking risk.

I am also being denied permission to run net <cmd>s.

What 'net' commands?  I do not even have 'net' command on my system

net
bash: net: command not found

man net
No manual entry for net

so I would need to know more about what command you were trying to run.  Like where is it located on the system, what is it suppose to do?

Internet searches are tedious, though I have found several docs. Any suggestions would be more than welcome!

Internet searches can also be very useful, and waiting for the right person to see then get around to asnwering your question can also be tedious

Learning Unix for Mac OS X Mountain Lion

<http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025870.do>

would be a good start.

Or going to a book store and browsing books on the 'bash' shell (the command line shell used by Mac OS X), as well as some other Unix/Linux introduction books. While general Unix/Linux books are not exactly the same as Mac OS X, they have enough of a cross section that you still will learn some basic things by reading them.

You can also search for tutorials on 'bash' via Google and find very good references you can read on-line for free.  They will get you started on using the command line.

But I am going to again strongly suggest that if you are going to use the sudo command, or go around changing permissions, that you have that recent backup (maybe 2 or 3) because unless you are very VERY careful or lucky, you will need to get stuff back from those backups.  NOTE:  I'm speaking from years of personal experience, not saying anything about you personally.

Message was edited by: BobHarris

Most logs are accessible via the Applications -> Utilities -> Console application.

Logs can be in many places.  Many kernel level logs are kept in /var/log