macworld.com — The 'Repair Permissions' function of Disk Utility has been under quite a bit of speculation as of late. There are those in one camp who believe repairing permissions is not much more than voodoo, while others in the support end of the Mac OS X community swear by it as the first line of defense. Macworld gets to the bottom of all this.
Aug 6, 2006 View in Crawl 4
vonnieAug 6, 2006
This is very important to point out. A lot of people think that repairing permissions is harmless, and that you can just as well do it. It is not harmless. It makes your system less secure.
reigginAug 6, 2006
$ diskutil repairPermissions /
zorkonAug 6, 2006
Did you read the article at all?The reasons given for the presence of the Repair Permissions options mostly dealt with dumb users or dumb software that changed OS permissions. The same problems exist on normal Unix systems. As another poster has pointed out, there's nothing worse than junior sysadmins and the power of chmod. :)There is only one Mac-specific reason for Repair Permissions; Macs capable of dual-booting into OS 9 (or running OS 9 apps via Classic) needed this functionality because OS 9 did not understand Unix permissions and would often mess with the filesystem. This problem is going away since none of the new Intel Macs are capable of running OS 9 these days anyways.
kruncherAug 6, 2006
I sorta RTFA, but is this like windows SFC utility? Why doesn't linux have a utility like this? Does it even need it?
Closed AccountAug 6, 2006
How about repairing a PowerBook that has burst into flames? <a class="user" href="http://digg.com/apple/Another_PowerBook_Mel_Gibsons">http://digg.com/apple/Another_PowerBook_Mel_Gibsons</a>
matadonAug 6, 2006
@repruhsent:Point.@uncleFester:I switched around the end of last year, at least for my primary desktop; my last job bought me a new computer as a 'thank you' for saving them like $40K in equipment costs (very small startup, so this was a biiiig chunk of change to them). Overall, OS X acts like a real Unix for the most part, although it took a few weeks to get used to using this 'System Preferences' thing, as opposed to just editing files in /etc.But, yeah, permissions work pretty much the same way on OS X that they work everywhere else, and 'Repair Permissions' is about as useless as it sounds from what I can see.As far as a way to save permissions, I actually wrote a pair of C programs, one to scan (and store) permissions of the important directories under root, and the other to look at that file and restore said permissions, only because I seem to have a knack of hiring people who 'misunderestimate' the power of -R.Of course, it's all useless now, because I'm enjoying a year of not working and going back to finish up the whopping four classes I need to get my BA...and my school is pretty much Windows-only, so they have little use for me.
danfrakesAug 7, 2006
@vonnieYou didn't even read the article, did you? ;-) -some columnist