[rt]

What are disk permissions? Each time I run Repair Disk Permissions from the Disk Utility I get something similar to the following:

2003-05-01 06:19:43 -0700 - 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
2003-05-01 06:24:20 -0700 - The privileges have been repaired on the selected volume.

What's this all mean?

tia

[dreilly1]

briefly...

Unix OS's are capable of having multiple users. Even if you are the only person using your Mac and you log in automatically, the computer is still multi-user.

Files have permissions that say which users can read, write, and execute them. Even if you are the only person using your computer, you can't normally just write anywhere you feel like; certain directories are protected from your screw-ups. (This is why you need to input an admin password to install stuff in OS X - you couldn't normally write into the directories where the installer installs stuff.

As for "repairing permissions", I would imagine that some applications muck with these permissions when they shouldn't, and the Disk Utility puts them back where they should be.

Since I'm being brief, the only other thing I'll say is that most Unix systems deal with these permissions on a User, Group (of users) level, and a global level. Each of these permissions is assigned a number, and other numbers deal with what user and group designation "sticks" with a particular file after someone with write access modifies it.

If you never do anything in the OS X terminal, then you probably don't need to know more than that. You can learn more by typing "man chmod" in the terminal, but that certainly won't be brief!

[macmend]

"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"

this is actually a bug and you shouldn't worry about it, there is more about this in apple's knowledge base


macmend

[rt]

thank you both for the info