Repairing permissions when owner is "Fetching..."

Problem: After upgrading to Yosemite I can’t unlock locked files (which were locked before Yosemite upgrade). In Get Info window in Finder the ”Locked” tick mark is grayed out. Sharing & Permissons are as follows:

Fetching… Read & Write

_appleevents Read only

everyone Read only

When I try to change the permissions (i.e. add myself), I get error message:

The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have the necessary permission.

I am the owner of the file and I am also administrator. I enabled root and logged in as root and still I couldn’t unlock the file or change the permissions.


I can duplicate the file and unlock the copy. Sharing & Permissons of the copy are as follows:

Hannu (Me) Read & Write

_appleevents Read only

everyone Read only

So, now the owener is correct and I can do with the file what ever I want.


However, I can’t trash the original locked file, I get error message:

”The operation can’t be completed because the item “<file name>” is locked."

If I duplicate the original locked file and delete the copy without unlocking it, I get error message:

”Item “<file name> copy” is locked. Do you want to move it to the Trash anyway?"

I can trash to copy which is locked but not the original which is unlocked as well.


The problem appeared after I moved to Yosemite (10.10.1). I did it in the following way. I had My MacBook Pro (15”, mid 2012) internal hard drive replaced with 1 TB SSD which had Yosemite installed. The old internal HD was put in a case and from there I moved user accounts and other stuff to the internal SSD with Migration Assistant.


I have repaired disk permissions with Disk Utility to no avail. I have done Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACL's with resetpassword in terminal from Recovery HD to no avail.


The problem seems to be that for some reason OS X can’t get the owner info of the locked file (owner is ”Fetching…”) and because the owner is unknown OS X doesn’t allow anyone (even the root) to change the permissions.


Any I ideas how to solve the problem, i.e. how to correct the permissions of all locked file (in a batch)?

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), null

Posted on Dec 17, 2014 2:27 PM

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Repairing permissions when owner is "Fetching..."

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