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absmiths · Jul 15, 2003, 11:45 AM

I just noticed that my admin user has two group memberships - staff and admin. When correcting permissions, does it matter whether I use user:staff or user:admin? If so, what are the implications of each?

I suspect that it matters because I have a misbehaving program and the groups are interchanged on it's files (probably about 3/4 staff, and 1/4 admin) - and I am curious what group to set them to in order to fix it.

ratlater · Jul 15, 2003, 12:22 PM

For fixing permissions I'd run the permission repair in disk util. As far as the staff and admin groups go, it is basically your preference. The staff group includes all users on your mac, and the admin group is limited only to admin users. So if you want to allow only admin users to access a file you should chooses the admin group. If you want all users on the comp choose staff.

-matt

absmiths · Jul 15, 2003, 05:07 PM

Originally posted by ratlater:
For fixing permissions I'd run the permission repair in disk util. As far as the staff and admin groups go, it is basically your preference. The staff group includes all users on your mac, and the admin group is limited only to admin users. So if you want to allow only admin users to access a file you should chooses the admin group. If you want all users on the comp choose staff.

-matt

Will the choice of one or the other affect programs that I run myself? It doesn't seem like it should, but I am just trying to figure out what's wrong.

absmiths · Jul 16, 2003, 09:16 AM

Originally posted by absmiths:
Will the choice of one or the other affect programs that I run myself? It doesn't seem like it should, but I am just trying to figure out what's wrong.

For whatever reasons, changing the group to admin in all cases fixed the problem.

drmbb2 · Jul 16, 2003, 11:33 AM

It's true that there is a group=admin and a group=staff, but there is (or at least should not be) any such user named "staff". All users, whether granted admin rights or not, are members of group=staff. Admin users are also members of group=admin (any user can be a member of mulitple groups).

absmiths · Jul 16, 2003, 02:43 PM

Originally posted by drmbb2:
It's true that there is a group=admin and a group=staff, but there is (or at least should not be) any such user named "staff". All users, whether granted admin rights or not, are members of group=staff. Admin users are also members of group=admin (any user can be a member of mulitple groups).

I'm not sure what brought up the user named staff thing, but I don't have one. When I mentioned user:staff and user:admin above I was using the chown notation of <<username>>:<<group>>.

ratlater · Jul 16, 2003, 03:25 PM

Originally posted by absmiths:
For whatever reasons, changing the group to admin in all cases fixed the problem.

Which program was misbehaving? I've very curious as to why the group privileges would affect it.

thanks,
-matt

absmiths · Jul 17, 2003, 09:31 AM

Originally posted by ratlater:
Which program was misbehaving? I've very curious as to why the group privileges would affect it.

thanks,
-matt

It was Starcraft, Brood War. I had StarCraft installed for a while and no problems, but then I ran the Brood War installer from Classic (Brood War just installs extra files into the StarCraft directory) and the files it created had different groups than the rest.

When I ran Brood War (again, using the StarCraft app), the program crashed whenever it tried to save a game and it never could save changes to a character (like completed levels).

Changing the group fixed it.