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Can't Update Applications: "You don't have permission to access some of the items"

L

LoneWolf121188

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 7, 2007
664
0
Longmont, CO
All of a sudden, I can't update my applications. When I open a dmg and drag the updated application into my Applications folder, it asks if I want to overwrite, so I hit yes, and then it says "The operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items." Huh? I shouldn't have to go to terminal and use sudo mv to do something like this...
 
The app itself may have modified the permissions of some of its resources.

So the question is: Is it really all drag and drop applications or was that an exaggeration?
 
Normally finder ask for your admin password, to let finder have permission or admin privilege to copy applications from dmgs by just simply drag and drop... but if Finder isn't asking for your admin privilege, than something weird is going on there. Sorry I had this problem once which is similar but I could not work it out myself . I end up excluding mostly all system files from Time Machine and did clean installation of Mac OS X and I got it fix from just doing that.
 
LoneWolf121188 said:
Nope.
Click to expand...

Then chances are the app itself has changed ownership on some its resources. You would need to dig in and find out where the issue is.

Code: 
ls -l

Is your friend here.


Damo01 said:
Normally finder ask for your admin password, to let finder have permission or admin privilege to copy applications from dmgs by just simply drag and drop... but if Finder isn't asking for your admin privilege, than something weird is going on there. Sorry I had this problem once which is similar but I could not work it out myself . I end up excluding mostly all system files from Time Machine and did clean installation of Mac OS X and I got it fix from just doing that.
Click to expand...

This is an overreaction.
 
Let's see...

drwxr-xr-x@ 3 501 admin 102 Jun 8 2010 Thunderbird.app
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 Ravi admin 102 Jan 21 23:11 Firefox.app


What's the @ symbol after the permissions? And what's this "501" user?

Also, some of the groups I see are "wheel" and "staff" ...never heard of those before. As you can tell, I'm fairly new to Unix, so I'd appreciate any knowledge I can get!
 
Just ran into this problem again updating Skype.

Terminal reports:

drwxr-xr-x 3 501 admin 102 Feb 8 2010 Skype.app

I did a sudo chmod to change it to rwxrwxrwx (confirmed by running ls -l again) and it still doesn't work: Finder still says "The operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items." Path Finder also gives a "Operation could not be completed" error. Help?
 
Login as Root and install the app

LoneWolf121188 said:
Just ran into this problem again updating Skype.

Terminal reports:

drwxr-xr-x 3 501 admin 102 Feb 8 2010 Skype.app

I did a sudo chmod to change it to rwxrwxrwx (confirmed by running ls -l again) and it still doesn't work: Finder still says "The operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items." Path Finder also gives a "Operation could not be completed" error. Help?
Click to expand...

You will be able to find the solution here
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=7b6f69f131f7bcf4&hl=en
 
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