[Frigidman]

I know this is more of a gamer forum, but, eh, you guys know your OS.

Lately, I have been seeing, some files just go dead with their permissions. Basically its like something is randomly doing a chmod 000 on the file. The "owner" remains, but the privs are no-no-no.

I cannot make out any rhyme or reason. Some are plain .txt. Some are .pdf. Some are an .exe I have stored from my PC. It seems like it could be any kind of file! However the only common factor is, it is not wide-spread across the entire drive and directories. It seems to only be isolated within my home directory. Anything anywhere else I have yet to see this behavior happen.

Ideas?

[the Battle Cat]

Well for a second there I was going to suggest we all dress up a flock of chickens in lederhosen, play tubas and drink beer but it suddenly dawned on me that you meant ideas about what is causing your permissions problem. It's a good thing I didn't post.

[Frigidman]

LOL.

[teflon]

one of the best things tBC has come up with all day! cant wait to see what crazy and zany thing he does/says next!

as to your problem, Im afraid I havent a clue. Sorry.

[bobbob]

Frigidman, on March 20th 2009, 07:57 AM, said:

it seems to only be isolated within my home directory

Some app you're running can't handle permissions? Did you copy those files over with something odd? Maybe run something as an administrator on them? Or maybe your FS/ drive is dying? What does fsck -fy say? (boot into single user mode)

[charmin]

Maybe it's the dreaded ACL

[Frigidman]

Fairly new hard drive (some post somewhere I wrote about it).

fsck -fy doesnt say anything.

Whats pretty odd... this one folder I went in to fix all the permissions on a handful of files, I just did a ls on it this morning, and some files are back reading weird:

----------@ 1 XXXX XXXX 81155 Mar 6 10:39 shot1.jpg
----------@ 1 XXXX XXXX 82002 Mar 6 10:39 shot2.jpg
----------@ 1 XXXX XXXX 83307 Mar 6 10:39 shot3.jpg

(the XXXX is in place of my user/group... not sharing that info! lol)

The even MORE crazy part, is if I "Get Info" on those files, they show as read/write to everyone.

I have a feeling its my windows XP machine. It connects to my home directory when I want to grab storage files (I download all windows files on my mac, then pull them over to the windows machine when I NEED them). The files though above, are not windows created, nor used. I made them on my mac, saved them on my mac, and never pulled or touched them from the XP side.

[Frigidman]

Also would like to add, it seems totally random on the user:group settings for files.

Some its MyUser:MyUser, others its MyUser:admin (where "MyUser" is my actual username/account on the machine).

Other thing to note, sometimes files have a @ symbol for their permissions (in terminal). Otherwise, some plain text files are 'x' (for executable).

Its like... my entire permissions/user/groups settings on files is totally scrambled up. What the heck?!

And last thing to note, sometimes the .DS_Store files are set to executable while some not, and the permissions again, all wacky:
-rwxrwxrwx@
-rw-------@
-rw-r-----@
-rw-rw-r--@


Even IF I reinstalled OSX all over and startedfrom scratch, all my backed up files are crazy messed up, and would come back like that. So I don't know what to make of this. Can't tell how far back in time this started to happen either.

[Frigidman]

I found this posted on the apple support forums... but the fire trucker didnt include the link, AND I have been searching and searching and cannot find it. This post was made in 2007... certainly apple has a solution by now?

"The older setup was to have a groupid number that matched the accountid number (501 and 501 for example). Unfortunately the group that is supposed to be represented by, say, groupid=501 is missing a piece of naming information that Leopard wants -- a bug in the portion of the installer that deals with legacy accounts like this. This results in the "unknown" group showing up in Get Info's permissions section for example.

Apple has a Knowledge Base article out now that purports to show two, simple Terminal commands to add the missing piece of information to the group record of each such account (an additional name beginning with an "_" underscore character, but it appears the pair of commands they posted are incorrect, so we are going to have to be patient a little while longer while they revise that."

I can confirm my machine is indeed missing the 'group' record for 501... which causes the "Unknown" to show up in Get Info group privs for many files.

[Tesseract]

Looks like you possibly found the main problem, but Windows does seem to love making things executable. IIRC this is because it doesn't have an execute permission (it's determined by the filename extension instead), so utilities that copy from Windows to Unix-ish systems tend to set the x bits on everything.

I believe the @ after the mode means the file is invisible.

[charmin]

Quote

Actually, "+" indicates the richer permission model (also known as ACLs).

The "@" sign -- which is not documented in the manual page for ls(1) -- indicates that the file has extended attributes. You can use the command 'xattr -l <filename>' to show them. It seems that a lot of Finder information, which ought to be stored in the catalog, is now in extended attributes. (Hmmm, or maybe it's actually still in the catalog file and just being exposed as extended attributes, which would make a lot of sense.)

[Bernie]

Fm,

Have you found this thread? If that is your problem, I'd read the whole thread before trying anything.

[Frigidman]

Thanks Bernie.

After reading through that thread, I have a pretty good idea what the frell happened.

I Had the original 10.5 Install DVD (this was before 10.5.6). I had used the "Migration" from my 10.4 install, for all my files and folders and apps (because honestly I did not want to spend weeks reconfiguring and installing everything I have!).

Well, it looks like doing so, with the old 10.5, it has serious issues with privs and perms. It sets the wrong group ids, it doesnt fix anything, and makes a broken group the same as the user (which is how the old 10.4- worked). See, 10.5, it wants to put all new users in the same 'group' and gid... of "staff 20". My machine, its all 501:501, where 501 is an unknown group to Finder.

Anyhow, I tried to boot to that CD and ran the Permissions and ACLs reset/fixer... well, that screw things up even more lol. It ended up changing ALL user's home directories to group of "wheel" !!! Which now any new files made, get the group of 'wheel', and NO users are actually IN the 'wheel' group (as evidenced by useing the nix command: id [username]).

So, it looks like I'm going to mirror my drive off to my external USB, then re-install 10.5 ground up, run through ALL the updates before I try migrating any user back. Hopefully the migration in 10.5.6 is FIXED (since all these problems were of 2007/2008). I will attempt a migrate of the user, then check the privs. If the migration of the new 10.5.6 WORKS, then I am done. Otherwise, I will have to manually migrate, by doing a 'copy' of each file into a 'new' user account. Then reinstall all my software too ugh. Only way to clean up all the permissions!

There were other mentions of running a mass spam nix command that changes all the group privs lol... but that sounds like asking for trouble. This popsnizzle should be automated by OSX, and I shouldnt "HAVE" to dig in with nix commands to fix things.

The article didnt explain why some files would suddenly get zero privs. Seems thats a unknown issue. It may be related to the fire trucked up group privs on my machine, and XP accessing and OSX not understanding what XP is doing, and things just get super fire trucked.

Backing up everything now. Oh joy.

[Frigidman]

Well, it seems migration assisstant, even after 2 years since it was first reported as a problem, is still broken. Whenever it migrates from an older OS (or a broken one), it doesnt do a dang thing about fixing anything.

So, I just went and installed a fresh OSX.5 ran through all the software update items it wanted to, then manually copied my files, and installed apps all over. I manually copied most prefs files for each app I installed, and those worked fine.

Now, going through my directories, and looking, there is now no longer any instance of a stupid 501 GID, nor anymore 'wheels' inside my home directory.

I swear Apple, get your popsnizzle together... this crap is like dealing with windows.

[ijedi42]

i always run diskwarrior before transferring anything from an old machine to a new one, i find that helps alot.

[bobbob]

Oh, on top of Migration Assistant being the popsnizzle, Apple ships a known broken piece of Samba. Upgrade that ASAP. The newer versions (3.3 or 4 IIRC) handle Mac extended attributes better.

[Frigidman]

Ah, good call.