[qualey2]

Help me understand my repaired permissions text.
They are as follows:
2004-09-26 21:12:55 -0400 - Repair of privileges has started
We are using special permissions for the file or directory ./System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/hfs.util. New permissions are 33261
Group differs on ./private/var/run/utmp, should be 0, group is 1
Owner and group corrected on ./private/var/run/utmp
Permissions corrected on ./private/var/run/utmp
Permissions differ on ./usr/share/man/man1/less.1, should be -rw-r--r-- , they are -r--r--r--
Owner and group corrected on ./usr/share/man/man1/less.1
Permissions corrected on ./usr/share/man/man1/less.1
Permissions differ on ./usr/share/man/man1/more.1, should be -r--r--r-- , they are -rw-r--r--
Owner and group corrected on ./usr/share/man/man1/more.1
Permissions corrected on ./usr/share/man/man1/more.1
2004-09-26 21:23:22 -0400 - The privileges have been repaired on the selected volume.

Thanks in advance.

[Brass]

What is it that you don't understand?

[qualey2]

Ummm, all of it. Do certian pars of it point program errors ? The first line, about the special permissions allways shows up. I just want to understand whats being "fixed".

[Brass]

It's easy to see what's being fixed in the listing. It gives you the file name, the permissions that the file had, and then the permissions that the file is being changed to.

What is causing the permissions to be incorrect in the first place is virtually impossible to tell. Some process which is replacing a file, or re-writing it's permissions. Who can tell? It happens all the time, and is generally not something to be worried about.

If you want to know what the various permissions mean (eg, -rw-r--r--), enter "man chmod" in the terminal. In general, this is a representation where the first character indicates a plain file (-) a directory (d) or a link (l), etc. The next three are permissions for the owner of the file, then 3 for users in the group that has been assigned to the file, the next three for all other users.

The triplets are of the form "rwxrwxrwx" where "r" is for read access, "w" is for write access and "x" is for execute access. A "-" means that permission is NOT granted.

So for -rw-r--r--, it is a plain file where the owner has read access and write access, the group has read access only, and other users have read access only.

These are sometimes represented as octal numbers for shorthand, with each triplet being represented by 1 octal digit. so the above permissions would be represented as "644" (or "0644" to include the file/type, sticky-bit triplet which is often left off for simplicity).

[qualey2]

Thanks , I understand better about whats going on, oh and thanks for responding quickly.