My silly colleague has managed to lock his desktop on his Macbook. He's running 10.6. I have tried running the following unix command in terminal:

chmod -R 777 [drop folder here]

on his desktop and home folder but it says operation not permitted.

He's got bootcamp installed and Windows 7 so I am blaming that.

Any ideas people? He's new to mac and has already blown this one up once

I've told him to delete his account and re-create it!

Create another account on the mac, give it admin privs, let it take ownership of the relevant directory then give it back to him?

JOn

Can you not select the main Home folder, do a "Get Info" and click the little padlock in the Sharing & Permissions section, entering in the user's admin password. Then, assuming the permissions on the main home folder are correct (i.e. the user is the owner, and all others are set to "Read only"), then go under the little options pop-up menu (the one with the cog wheel icon at the bottom) and select "Apply to enclosing items" - which should filter down the same permissions to all subfolders in that Home folder. The Desktop is just a folder within the main Home folder anyway.

Or try using Disk Utility's "Repair Disk Permissions" option?

Have you tried running chmod with sudo?

+1

The home directory should look like this:


Make sure the owner and group is correct (the "benlavery" is the owner, "staff" if the group).

If any of the above was incorrect, I would do:


That sorts out owners. If there is a problem with permissions, it should probably be:


Check out this too:


His groups should be pretty similar to mine I'd have though. To add a group, I'm pretty sure you can do:


The Mac I am using to test all this is running the latest version of Snow Leopard, I am the first and only user on here (uid 501) and am an admin user. Should be pretty similar to your guy?

It's OK panic over he'd locked the folder!

And yes I do sudo when I do any commands in Unix - thanks!

Don't! It's bad practise. Best case is you lock someone out of something and you have to go back in and undo it. Worst case is that you delete/remove/unset something that you can't undo.

<wrinkles brow> Actually, wouldn't a 'repair permissions' from Disk Utility fix this?

Jon

Depends if Disk Utility plays with user files or just system files...

I find terminal commands are quicker. There's a number of ways you can do it.

C

<Nods>. Certainly if you have a list of what bits to fix. In this case however it sounded like nobody knew quite what had been done, so it's worth considering letting the computer 'set everything back the way it should be' in one go rather than having to hunt down god-knows-what ACL changes down through his home directory tree.

Jon