Comments on: Fixing Mac OSX File Permissions and ACLs From the Command Line

By: Rich

Rich — Sun, 06 May 2012 08:36:41 +0000

After doing a migration assistant from a time machine backup, I couldn’t move or delete a file without typing my password. The recursive option worked perfectly. Thank you!

By: Evan McDaniel

Evan McDaniel — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:05:21 +0000

Thanks so much. Helped me out big time when I changed all my permissions on my App Support folder (which was not a good idea, as it turns out).

By: Antonio Cuamatzi

Antonio Cuamatzi — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:16:14 +0000

Yesterday I started suffering with a borrowed Mac mini whose Leopard needs to be reinstalled ASAP but I got no time for that now. Problem is, every new user account I create comes with file permissions problems that Disk Utility won’t repair. Every single file in this machine that comes from any Mac or PC over the network can’t be edited, moved or deleted without typing first an admin’s password.
Today Google brought me to this blog and I found the answer: obliterate the entire ACL! =D I can now use the backup from another Mac mini with Snow Leopard I’ve been working on for months without the annoying “Enter an admin password” requisite.
Thanks! That “-N” was my salvation.

By: John Dillingham

John Dillingham — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 14:53:49 +0000

I’ve been trying to fix this for weeks, I finally stumbled across your blog via google. Thanks so much for posting this, it helped fix my issue with restored files from a Time Machine Backup!

By: John

John — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:04:40 +0000

that was exactly what I needed! I had restored from a Time Machine backup and was everything looked OK on permissions, but I could not delete a file without an username and password prompt. It turns out deny delete was on. Removing the ACL was exactly the thing that worked. I used the chmod -R -N command on each folder in my home directory. Thank you!

By: Locked Files in Mac OS X | 603

Locked Files in Mac OS X | 603 — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:27:28 +0000

[...] Your file may have an ACL that prevents writing by the current user. To view ACLs for a file, issue ls -le. Use chmod to modify ACLs. Run chmod -N to remove the ACL. [...]

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:55:01 +0000

Rather than deleting the ACL in its entirety, I chose to give myself more specific permissions for the file. In my case .ssh/config had these settings:

green:.ssh ben$ ls -le
-rw-r--r--@ 1 ben  staff    73 Sep 14 10:23 config
 0: group:everyone deny write,delete,append,writeattr,writeextattr,chown

I ran chmod +a# 0 "ben allow write" config, after which I could modify the file. The permissions finally look like this:

green:.ssh ben$ ls -le config 
-rw-r--r--@ 1 ben  staff  73 Sep 14 10:23 config
 0: user:ben allow write
 1: group:everyone deny write,delete,append,writeattr,writeextattr,chown

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:34:41 +0000

@Erin, you could add the -R (recursive) flag to chmod which will update anything below the current directory. For instance if your problem files are located in /Volumes/foo you could run this:
chmod -R -N /Volumes/foo
However, if you’re dealing with system files, you may want to be a bit more clever and script something to enumerate the list of files with broken permissions and loop through them individually.

By: Erin

Erin — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:26:05 +0000

This was a really useful post! After using Migration Assistant in Lion, I did what I could to move all my files from the user account created via MA to my user account when I set up my system. Of course, I was getting prompted by Finder to move any of the files from the old user – super annoying!

I tested using chmod -N fixed on one of my files and sure enough, it does the trick! Unfortunately I have a *ton* of files that have this problem.

Is there any kind of shortcut or guidance you could give in order to do this for multiple (i.e. thousands of) files?

Thanks so much for the great article!

By: Pedro Maldonado

Pedro Maldonado — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:06:00 +0000

This post is wonderful! Just cleared up an issue with Parallels and a backup from TimeMachine just like you described! Thank you!