[posthumanus]

i was running some maintenance and this came up:

Warning: SUID file “System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent” has been modified and will not be repaired.

is it important/dangerous?

thanks

[Spheric Harlot]

It's completely irrelevant.

It will show up every time you repair permissions, and can be ignored.

Mac OS X: Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions messages that you can safely ignore

Note that there's no reason to run a permissions repair regularly unless you're actually seeing problems or have time to waste.

[P]

I wonder if anyone has made a psychological study of this need humans have to look for maintenance where none is needed.

You don't need to regulrarly defragment your disk, you don't need to "clear memory", you don't need to clear caches, and you don't need to "repair" (reset would be more correct) permissions. Some of these can be useful if you actually have a problem, but even that is very rare. If you want to do preventive maintenance for some reason, make another backup and verify that you can boot from it.

[posthumanus]

okay then, thanks.

(no shrinks for me though)

[Waragainstsleep]

Originally Posted by P 

I wonder if anyone has made a psychological study of this need humans have to look for maintenance where none is needed.

I suspect it comes from using Windows before switching.

[posthumanus]

look guys, i don't mind you implying i have a mental illness. but windows?! that's going too far.

[Big Mac]

Haha. Yeah, a lot of it does come from being trained by less sophisticated OSs like Windows or classic Mac OS to do routine system maintenance. The Windows Registry gets gunked up regularly because it's such a terrible, fragile system architecture. So when people see that there's such a thing as permissions repair in Mac OS X, some feel compelled to practice it as a routine.

[P]

I'm not implying a mental illness - in fact I'm assuming that you're perfectly healthy, because this is so common that you're practically blending into the background. I'm just interested in why. Past habits are of course a possibility, but I wonder if that really is the whole cause. Most Windows users I know work according to the principle of "it works fine now, don't touch it!", and if they do any maintenance, it's probably defragmentation, which is mostly pointless these days.