staff and wheel users ?
I have two users that show up in the permissions group when ZI look at get info for my folders and drives.
What is the staff and wheel users and what is the purpose of these users?
Question marked as
Top-ranking reply
Staff and Wheel are "Groups".
Unix permissions are broken down into User (Owner), Group, World (Other), with separate read, write, execute permissions settings for each class of user. "Staff" and "Wheel" are standard Groups.
Generally all user accounts are also granted "Staff" membership. So if you create another user account on your system they would have a unique User ID, but would also be granted "Staff" membership. Permissions could be assigned that would allow other members of Staff access to your files, but deny World/Other access (NOTE: World does not really mean all members of planet Earth, just other processes on your system that are not you and not a member of your group; remember these terms were invented when computers were not networked, and they were their own little world).
"Wheel", as in "A Big Wheel", meaning someone of importance and authority, is a group for administrators. Many files are part of the Wheel group with permissions that allow users in the Wheel group to access them, but would not allow other users without Wheel group access.
Staff and Wheel are normal in a Mac OS X system. Please do not mess with them.