[posthumanus]

there are 2 of us (my daughter & i) using this ‘puter and often i want to chop & change music/pics/aliases of new apps to/from her desktop (without resorting to the shared folder)

have tried everything i can think of but permissions are screwed all over the place

is there anything i can do to allow all users all access to all files & folders?

(preferably without using the terminal)

posthumanus

[msuper69]

Originally posted by posthumanus:
there are 2 of us (my daughter & i) using this ‘puter and often i want to chop & change music/pics/aliases of new apps to/from her desktop (without resorting to the shared folder)

have tried everything i can think of but permissions are screwed all over the place

is there anything i can do to allow all users all access to all files & folders?

(preferably without using the terminal)

posthumanus

Have everybody use the same login.

[CharlesS]

What's wrong with the Shared folder? That's probably what I'd do, but I suppose you could make her Desktop folder world-readable and world-writable.

[Millennium]

You do not want to do this. It would open up your machine to the kinds of nasties that you may very well have come to the Mac in order to avoid.

There are plenty of real solutions, but as others have mentioned the simplest is to simply use one login for all the people in your family.

[Earth Mk. II]

If I'm understanding what you want to do correctly, the easiest thing to do would be to just have the both of you use the same user account or use the Shared folder (that's what it's there for, after all).

However, if you need to do it with multiple accounts, adding yourself to your daughter's user group and making her home folder group writable (not world writable) would probably be the safest (least unsafe) way, though probably the most technical way to do it.

You certainly do not want to make all files read/write by all users.

I'd read up on OS X's user permission system. Just so you can get an idea of what you'd need to do and what the implications are.

This is a compromise, and though I think it's a reasonable one, I don't know what (if any) effect this would have on your system in practice. YMMV, Caveat Emptor, etc etc.

[posthumanus]

thank you

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Earth Mk. II:
However, if you need to do it with multiple accounts, adding yourself to your daughter's user group and making her home folder group writable (not world writable) would probably be the safest (least unsafe) way, though probably the most technical way to do it.

You certainly do not want to make all files read/write by all users.

Well, of course not. The problem with this is that given that the OP doesn't want to use the Terminal, he's probably not going to be too hot on using NetInfo Manager, another quite complicated app, either, which is what he'll have to do to make a new group and put the two users in it.

I was certainly not suggesting to make the whole home folder world writable, but if it were just the Desktop, it might be acceptable, since it sounds like the Desktop is going to be used basically for the files that are intended to be shared in this case.

But yeah, the way I'd recommend doing this would be to use the Shared folder.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Millennium:
You do not want to do this. It would open up your machine to the kinds of nasties that you may very well have come to the Mac in order to avoid.

Well, only if you make the entire machine read/write, and even then you're probably not going to be opening yourself up any more than usual unless your'e running services like web servers, etc.

Just make her desktop group read/write. Open Finder, navigate to HD/Users/yourdaughter, select Desktop and Get Info, Under Ownership and Permissions (expand if necessary) click the lock and change the group permissions to read & write.

[itai195]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
Just make her desktop group read/write. Open Finder, navigate to HD/Users/yourdaughter, select Desktop and Get Info, Under Ownership and Permissions (expand if necessary) click the lock and change the group permissions to read & write.

That's what I do with my girlfriend's desktop, documents, music, and pictures folders so that I can back them up. Works fine. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this solution.

Another option is to symlink both of your desktop folders to a folder within the Shared folder, so that you're both sharing the same desktop folder. Your home directories are still distinct this way, except for the desktop.