Permissions Repair across OSX versions

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Regardless of Apple's claim that El Capitan automatically repairs permissions, I have found definitely one and possibly two incidents of the wrong permissions causing issues. The first was a UserEventAgent that was using 100% CPU usage until I tracked down two plists that had to be manually re-authenticated. And the second is my NvidiaDriverManager control panel which appears broken on my machine, which means CUDA won't run properly in supporting apps.

So the question is, can I repair permissions on my El Capitan drive from Yosemite? After all these years I have never thought about if repairing permissions across OSX versions is safe to do.

 

[flowrider]

Don't see why it wouldn't work. But for El Cap I am using TechTool Pro. V 8.0.3 released last week now supports El Cap and one of it's features is Repair Permissions.

Lou

 

[leman]

Did you submit bug reports to Apple and Nvidia?

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Did you submit bug reports to Apple and Nvidia?

No I just plaster my complaints all over forums because I genuinely believe in rabble rousing

 

[leman]

No I just plaster my complaints all over forums because I genuinely believe in rabble rousing

Haha, we have something in common then. I'm just more lazy

 

[jonahlee]

Onyx from Titanium will allow you to repair permissions in El Capitan.

 

[KALLT]

Regardless of Apple's claim that El Capitan automatically repairs permissions, I have found definitely one and possibly two incidents of the wrong permissions causing issues. The first was a UserEventAgent that was using 100% CPU usage until I tracked down two plists that had to be manually re-authenticated. And the second is my NvidiaDriverManager control panel which appears broken on my machine, which means CUDA won't run properly in supporting apps.

Out of curiosity, which .plist files? How did you find out that the permissions were wrong and that this was the cause of the problem? Have you disabled SIP?

The permissions repair happens only at system updates, as far as I know.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

Out of curiosity, which .plist files? How did you find out that the permissions were wrong and that this was the cause of the problem? Have you disabled SIP?

The permissions repair happens only at system updates, as far as I know.

Yes it happened after the 10.11.1 update. This is the thread where someone helped me track the problem down

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...f-el-capitan-need-repair-permissions.1931189/

 

[KALLT]

Yes it happened after the 10.11.1 update. This is the thread where someone helped me track the problem down

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...f-el-capitan-need-repair-permissions.1931189/

I understand that the problem was a faulty launch agent or daemon in /Library or ~/Library. However, these are created not by the system but often by package installers or manually. Assuming the permissions were indeed wrong and the direct cause of the problem then it is still not clear what caused the change in permissions to begin with, perhaps they were overwritten by an update of the program in question or by a permissions repair.

What you can do in these cases is use the pkgutil command in Terminal. pkgutil --pkgs reveals a list of receipts of all the packages you installed. You can verify the permissions of a single receipt with pkgutil --verify <id> and repair with pkgutil --repair <id>. In your case you could look for the Wacom driver receipt.

 

[chrfr]

Regardless of Apple's claim that El Capitan automatically repairs permissions, I have found definitely one and possibly two incidents of the wrong permissions causing issues.
...So the question is, can I repair permissions on my El Capitan drive from Yosemite? After all these years I have never thought about if repairing permissions across OSX versions is safe to do.

Keep in mind that Apple's Repair Permissions function only ever "repaired" Apple's own system files. It would not have fixed 3rd party files in either the LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons folders anyway.
Repairing Permissions in 10.10.x won't repair 10.11 specific files, and won't properly set any permissions that may differ between the two operating systems.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

I understand that the problem was a faulty launch agent or daemon in /Library or ~/Library. However, these are created not by the system but often by package installers or manually. Assuming the permissions were indeed wrong and the direct cause of the problem then it is still not clear what caused the change in permissions to begin with, perhaps they were overwritten by an update of the program in question or by a permissions repair.

What you can do in these cases is use the pkgutil command in Terminal. pkgutil --pkgs reveals a list of receipts of all the packages you installed. You can verify the permissions of a single receipt with pkgutil --verify <id> and repair with pkgutil --repair <id>. In your case you could look for the Wacom driver receipt.

When I removed the plists that were resulting in the CPU load I naturally added them back to the launch folders to verify if they were the culprit. Doing that causes Finder to ask me to authenticate the plists. Having done that and rebooted the problem was solved. The 10.11.1 update was the only change I made prior to the problem so there must have been a change made during the upgrade process.