[Ted L. Nancy]

My wife used our Mac Pro exclusively since we purchased it. I upgraded to Snow Leopard (clean install), then recently set up an admin account for myself on the computer. When I set up my account, I copied my documents directly from my MacBook. I've been experiencing problems with file permissions ever since.

Basically, files that are created or that are already on the computer have the permissions all jacked up where either one or both of us cannot access the file. Also, attempts to edit the permissions from the Get Info pane oftentimes are in vain.

Any ideas what may be going on? I've run Repair Disk Permissions, but I do not know what else to do.

[Cold Warrior]

BadChmod is a nice gui for permisions. Some say it works more reliably than Get Info.
Download BatChmod for Mac - Change file ownership & permissions. MacUpdate Mac Software Downloads

Make sure you make yourself owner for the folder you copied and apply to all subfolders and files. I assume the files you reference are all in there.

Does your wife use a different account? How is she accessing your account's documents folder?

[Ted L. Nancy]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

BadChmod is a nice gui for permisions. Some say it works more reliably than Get Info.
Download BatChmod for Mac - Change file ownership & permissions. MacUpdate Mac Software Downloads

Make sure you make yourself owner for the folder you copied and apply to all subfolders and files. I assume the files you reference are all in there.

Does your wife use a different account? How is she accessing your account's documents folder?

Thanks, Cold. I'll give this a shot and report in a bit.

Yes, on our Mac Pro running SL, my wife and I each have our own (admin) accounts. She accesses my documents (and I occasionally access hers) simply by using the Finder to navigate to our respective account folders.

I like the organization of having two separate accounts, but not necessarily the permissions headache that goes along with it. Ideally, we would like to have all the files on the computer fully accessible (Read & Write) from either account.

[Cold Warrior]

Well you can try fixing ownership, then using Get Info to add your wife's account as read write. However, an alternative is to put shared documents onto an external drive, a second internal drive, a partition, or a network share, and use OS X's option to ignore permissions on that drive (I know it's an option for externals, not sure about internals, partitions, or LAN shares b/c I don't have any at present to confirm). This will probably be less of a headache in the long run.

[Ted L. Nancy]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

Well you can try fixing ownership, then using Get Info to add your wife's account as read write.

I just used BatChmod to fix the ownership on both account home folders and all their enclosed files. I then added the other user to each home folders and all enclosed files. So far, so good.

As an aside, like I said, I've been having this issue for some time. The "last straw" that led me to post about it was the fact that one of my pictures in my pictures folder (but not in my iPhoto library) would not sync to my iPhone. (I got the "Some of your photos including thus and such file could not be copied because they cannot be displayed on your iPhone" message.) I thought it was a permissions issue since I've gotten used to checking that lately, and the files permissions did in fact seem a bit confused. After using BatChmod to change the permissions, I was still having the problem syncing that one file to my iPhone even though the permissions seemed to be in order from what I could gather from the Get Info pane. In any event, I was able to solve the issue by scrapping the ubiquitous iPod Photo Cache folder from my pictures folder.

So, thanks again for the assistance.