General Question

richardhenry's avatar

For some reason, my dad can rename the protected folders inside of his Mac OS X home folder?

Asked by richardhenry (12692points) January 12th, 2009

My dad accidentally managed to rename his Library folder, which caused most of his applications to briefly freak-the-fuck-out.

When he realised what had happened, he tried to change the name back, but OS X had already created a hidden replacement. I walked him through enabling and using the root account to delete the new folder, and to rename the old folder back. He logged back into his account, and thankfully* everything was back to normal.

* I didn’t feel like spending 11 hours on the phone

For some reason though, he is fully able to rename or delete the should-be-protected folders inside of his home folder. On any normal Mac, if you try to tamper with the Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Library, Movies, Music, Pictures, Public or Sites folders, you’ll be told that OS X needs them and that you’re a very naughty boy.

Is there a conf setting that stops these folders from being protected by OS X? I can’t find anything on the Google.

He’s using Leopard.

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8 Answers

PupnTaco's avatar

Sounds like his permissions got jacked up. I’d run Disk Utility on the drive and repair permissions.

In theory, the entire drive could’ve been selected and under Get Info, you could change folder permissions for all enclosed items to something different if you were logged in as an Admin.

richardhenry's avatar

Already tried repairing permissions to no effect. :( It is my understanding that the folders are protected by the Finder itself, and not by system level permissions.

richardhenry's avatar

You can screw around with them via the Terminal, for example.

jrpowell's avatar

An aside. While looking into this question I managed to alter some of the file permissions in my home folder. If anyone would run this and post the output I would be grateful.

Macintosh:/ yourusername$ cd ~
Macintosh:~ yourusername$ ls -l

I would like to set them back to normal.

richardhenry's avatar

drwx———+ 5 richardhenry staff 170 12 Jan 00:34 Desktop
drwx———+ 14 richardhenry staff 476 8 Jan 00:52 Documents
drwx———+ 47 richardhenry staff 1598 12 Jan 04:52 Downloads
drwx———+ 56 richardhenry staff 1904 2 Jan 17:38 Library
drwx———+ 14 richardhenry staff 476 8 Jan 03:11 Movies
drwx———+ 6 richardhenry staff 204 25 Sep 00:26 Music
drwx———+ 8 richardhenry staff 272 4 Sep 19:54 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x+ 5 richardhenry staff 170 30 Jul 13:24 Public
drwxr-xr-x+ 8 richardhenry staff 272 3 Dec 10:52 Sites

Some of the hyphens on the top bunch were goobered into em dashes by formatting, but you get the idea.

cage's avatar

I just realised this question makes no sense…
Like the sentence makes no sense. It’s more of an unfinished statement.
Silly Richard :)
It’s like the “I’m Rob Burgundy?” from Anchor Man

richardhenry's avatar

It’s a perfectly good questment, or statemetion.

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