A separate mobile division, called the Mobility Division, was formed in 1995.

As most of you will know Mac OS X is a UNIX-based Operating System based upon the ). As such a lot of the functionality found in UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, and BSD for that matter, is present and in most cases identical, as well as the binaries. The GUI just provides the interface to issue calls and system calls to lower level components.

Running a permissions fix can be done using Disk Utility, and commands in the Terminal. For Disk Utility, open the program and then select your boot volume, followed by clicking the Verify Permissions button (or the permissions fix button) in the First Aid tab.

Throughout my career in IT, I have seen a lot of misconceptions about command line but most importantly dangerous and bad practices to avoid using it. Worst one being: enabling the “root” user, logging into the GUI as root, and using Finder to change file/folder permissions. This practice is dangerous and should never be used. It is especially worrying that people often enable and operate their systems as the root user so they have complete access over the machine. But this is a completely different discussion. So let’s talk about file/folder permissions, namely, “chown” and “chmod”. You may have guessed already that we can use chown to change file/folder ownership and chmod to change file/folder permissions.

There are a number of ways to use these tools but let’s look at OCTETS. Once you understand the OCTETS you can then navigate the file system and perform tasks, without the need to enable root, as a local admin user (use sudo). We’ll assume you have a file called “file.txt” located in /private/etc/. The local admin does not have access to modify permissions those files, only root does. Best practice dictates to use terminal to change permissions. Now,we’ll assume that you wanted to grant everyone using the machine permissions to access that file. These can be achieved by issuing this command sudo chmod 777 /private/etc/file.txt But what are those 7s you may ask?

They are called OCTETS. Now we will see the output of a terminal command “ls –l” and pay attention to the first column. What do those letters stand for? Free mac antivirus.

R = read access w = write access x = execute d = indicates a directory l = indicates a symbolic link i.e. Shortcut/pointer to another file/folder Column 3 indicates “owner of the file” and Column 4 “indicates group”. Each file/folder has a series of bit indicating “who has what access.” You will also notice 9 permission bits. From left to right, the first 3 “owner permissions,” second 3 “group permissions” and last 3 “everyone’s permissions.” Everyone implies all other users of the system (it is itself a group). Use this as an example.

Do not change permissions of files within /private/etc/ unless you know what you are doing. In the above example, afpovertcp.cfg has the following permissions: • User “root” has read, write access • Group “wheel” has read access only • Everyone else has read access only. Sudo chmod 123 which would change permissions of file “file.txt” to be: • Owner: Only Execute • Group: Only Write • Everyone: Write, Execute To apply the same permissions to a folder and all of its sub contents you can add the “-R” flag after chmod or chown and that will propagate permissions across all the folders/files within the folder you selected. **BE CAREFUL Disclaimer While the author has taken care to provide our readers with accurate information, please use your discretion before acting upon information based on the blog post. Amsys will not compensate you in any way whatsoever if you ever happen to suffer a loss/inconvenience/damage because of/while making use of information in this blog.