fortes
Level 1
(21 points)
Q: Strange Permissions on my 10,1 iMac
Happy New Year! I'm hoping some clever IT person can interpret these mystery runes . . .
Rather a lot of strange things tend to happen on my 3 year old iMac. As a result I've got more used to Restarting than anyone would wish (most every day) . Then every week or so I "Repair Disk Permissions."
And when I do there's maybe a hundred items all pretty similar, an example being:
Permissions differ on "Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resourc...gGeneralView.nib", should be drwxr-xr-x ; they are-rwxr-xr-x .
(I tried to include a screenshot but a notice said No Can Do)
These hundred or so problems are strikingly similar, the string usually starting with "Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/ " and often ends with "should be drwxr-xr-x ; they are-rwxr-xr-x ."
Sometimes it's not iTunes but Safari, but mostly iTunes which, in fact, I seldom use. A week later, tho' I've not kept a copy, it looks like the same piece of business happens with Permissions again. Another 100 times.
Please, what's all this indicating?
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
Klaus1
Level 8
(48,913 points)
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.
