Just a quick question about why permissions change? I run the disk utility about once a week, and once a week there are several permissions to be fixed, regardless of whether or not I have installed new software. Some things always have the wrong permissions (I always see something about /man being corrected). For the most part fixing permissions always fixes when my computer acts funny, so why do they change so much and is there something Apple can do to fix them from changing?
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Why do permissions change?
- Thread starter iPat
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ya I was wounding the exact same?... but Ive only heard about this on these and other boards and most of time when somethings slow or wrong everyone says to check permissions. At the moment I have a windows computer (first mac is now on order, 1.42 powermac) and could someone please explain to a mac soon to be newbie what this is and like he said why they change? and is there any windows thing that I could relate to with what permisions are
because mac os x is a unix-based os and thus multi-user, every file has "permissions" which tell the system which users have what privelages with that file. sometimes, these permissions get messed up, so you may not be able to execute/modify files that you should be able to. this is not always apparent, because it's mostly invisible system files and various unix bits. when these permissions are wrong, lots of little weird problems can occur, like system slowdowns, network disconnection, keyboard trouble (these are the more severe and uncommon problems, mostly it's just a slowdown). by repairing permissions with diskutility, these problems are solved.
i'm not quite sure what causes the permissions to change, but for some reason it tends to happen more frequently in 10.2 than previous versions. installing software packages can sometimes disrupt the permissions.
with 10.2.3, i have not had any problems i could attribute to incorrect permissions. i would suggest repairing permissions about once a week for a couple of weeks, and if there are never more than a few lines about "man" files and other mundane things, you can probably forego repairing all together unless things start to get weird.
i'm not quite sure what causes the permissions to change, but for some reason it tends to happen more frequently in 10.2 than previous versions. installing software packages can sometimes disrupt the permissions.
with 10.2.3, i have not had any problems i could attribute to incorrect permissions. i would suggest repairing permissions about once a week for a couple of weeks, and if there are never more than a few lines about "man" files and other mundane things, you can probably forego repairing all together unless things start to get weird.