On 06/10/10 10:34PDT, Dan wrote:
At 10:13 AM -0700 10/6/2010, Dennis B. Swaney wrote:
On 06/10/10 09:38PDT, Bruce Johnson wrote:
Have you tried enabling "root" and booting up into it? You should
then be able to change the permissions.
For a variety of reasons, enabling root to have login permissions is
a Very Bad Idea. Don't do that; you can render vast chunks of your
system unavailable to other users and open countless security holes
in file permissions and ownership.
Ditto Terminal, IF you are not careful.
There is a big difference between Terminal and a fully rooted account.
The rooted account totally ignores all system protections ALL THE TIME -
in both the file systems on disk and and in the running OS itself. A
tiny slip destroys things.
PRECISELY why it is to be used as the LAST resort.
Terminal, OTOH, is simply a NORMAL command line interface. It is no more
risky than using Finder and your normal apps. It isn't rooted, until you
use a sudo command -- and then it's JUST that one command (sudo -s
excluded, which creates a rooted shell).
May be "normal" for you Unix geeks, but not for most. I don't know Unix
so I don't use Terminal. However, the fact that when I used "root" it
was the normal Mac GUI allowed me to do what I could not do in Terminal.
But as I said before, I was extremely careful and only did the one
action; I then immediately logged out of root and disbled it again. Of
course it is also the fact that "root" uses the Mac GUI that makes it
extremely dangerous per to your explanation above.
As I said, Walter should try your step-by-step suggestion; if he doesn't
want to take a chance doing that, then perhaps he should just take his
Mac into an Apple Store and let them fix the permissions problem.
--
Sincerely,
Dennis B. Swaney
"Windows is a command-line OS with a GUI shell while Mac System 10 is
... oh, never mind."
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