[bjresta]

I have mucked around and screwed up permissions on portions of the Users folders and its subfolders. Disk Utility repairs permissions for systems folders, but not the Users subfolders.

What should permissions be set to for regular and administrative accounts and their various subfolders (Library, System, Documents, etc.)? Do those permissions apply to their enclosed files? Can I fix this using a utility like BatChmond (the tool I used to screw things up in the first place), or am I better off to go about it some other way?

Am running Mac OS 10.3.7.

[Kamsin]

I'm pretty new to the mac, but have used *nix for many years. IMHO the best way to fix this would be from the command-line.

To do so, open Terminal and then issue the following commands. The first will repair directories, the second regular files.

find /Users/dave -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;

find /Users/dave -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \;

(of course, you'll want to replace dave with your 'short' user name)


If file ownerships got messed up too, you might want to run this first:

sudo find /Users/dave -exec chown dave:dave {} \;

[jaknudsen]

Thanks a lot for those!

Fixed my system when the whole Users folder was pretty messed up, the System didn't even recognized the different users.

[Millennium]

Apple's utility doesn't repair user folders because it is expected that users might change them deliberately. For example, you can prevent anyone other than you from accessing your Home folder by setting its permissions to 700 (WARNING: If you do this, you won't be able to share files out of your Home folder, and this includes Web Sharing).

[jdogg99]

BatchMod is a nice GUI program for changing permissions on files and folders. Check versiontracker.com. I should point out, though, that it doesn't "know" what user permissions should be set to. I've used it on computers where the desktop inexplicably becomes inaccessible to the user, and it's worked great.