Fixing permissions?

[pubwvj]

At one time I copied a bunch of files from my son's computer to my wife's computer and into her home directory. Ever since then I have had permissions errors when trying to do backups from her machine across the network to my machine where I keep a backup copy of her home directory.

I have gone through by hand and thought I had found and fixed all the problem files but the problem persists.

I have run Disk Utility Fix Permissions repeatedly on my wife's machine to try to fix this but the problem continues.

Apparently there continue to be a few files with the wrong owner permissions scattered among her home subdirectories.

We are running Panther MacOSX 10.3.9.

Ideas on how to fix this? Is there a utility or a terminal command that I can use to fix this?

 

[iMeowbot]

Yeah, disk Utility's Repair Permissions won't do anything for user folders.

How are you going about the cleanup? The "apply to enclosed items" thingy in the Finder's Get info usually works pretty well, if you don't want to mess with chown and chmod and sudo (oh my!).

 

[krimson]

is it the cd9660 permission?
that's always needing repair.

 

[pubwvj]

is it the cd9660 permission? That's always needing repair.

*sigh* Wish it was only that. No, this is in the home folder. Lots of data files.

 

[pubwvj]

The "apply to enclosed items" thingy in the Finder's Get info usually works pretty well, if you don't want to mess with chown and chmod and sudo (oh my!).

Unfortunately the "apply to enclosed items" does not seem to always do its job. I have hesitated to do a massive application of chown/chmod because I fear there may be things I should not be changing and I'll end up with more of a mess than now. What I may end up doing is backing up, doing it on a backup and seeing if that solves the problem and then doing it on the original. I was hoping there might be some handy utility for this that would do it and not mess things up.

 

[iMeowbot]

That is the problem, any automated utility would also need to know what permissions you intended files to have in the first place.

Does the backup utility you are using tell you what files are causing the problems? Does an ls -l on the affected file show anything unusual (an owner that doesn't exist or something like that?) A common problem with files restored from another machine is that they end up retaining the UID from the old machine if the tool isn't told to ignore that at restore time.

 

[pubwvj]

sudo chown -R user:user /Users/user

appears to have done the trick on fixing the owners.
I was still getting errors with my backup program.
Deleting the original backup and doing a fresh copy seems to have helped that.

Thanks for the suggestions.