My permissions nightmare - help!

[Dave00]

So, this has been a real pain in the butt. I got a new hard drive, and wanted to do a clean install of the system. So, I partitioned the drive in two, copied my old system to one partition, and re-installed OS-X on the other. When I used migration assistant to transfer my old files, it told me to create a new user (let's call this User2), because it couldn't replace the user I'd created with the install (User1). Fine enough. But I'd imported some digital photos off my camera onto User1, which I now had to transfer to User2. I moved these to User1 public folder, then logged back in as user2, and moved the files to my pictures folder. Now, every time I try to modify these files, it says I don't have permission to do so. Any command-line process or other method of fixing that? I tried "Fix permissions" with Disk Utility, no help. Get Info says I have "Custom Access", User1 has Read/Write permission. What am I doing wrong?

Dave

 

[LtRammstein]

What are the general permissions for both users?

For example: User1 = Administrator, User2 = Regular User.

If both users are administrators, they could potentially run into that permissions issue. If that's the case on the ORIGINAL user that those photos existed with it would be easy to go into Terminal.app and type this:

cd /LOCATION/OF/PICTURES/FOLDER
chmod 770 *.*

Here's an example:

cd ~/Pictures/
chmod 770 *.*

What it does is it sends you to the location of the pictures and it will change the permissions on ALL the files in that folder to 770 or rwx - rwx - ---

You can change it up to what you want.

What I do is this:

chmod 770  ~/Pictures/*.*

Without changing directories I can change all the files (no folders are being changed) to the permissions of 770.

Hopefully this will help. If anyone sees any terminal commands that I am messing up, please say something! I'm stuck a PC for the time being and I can't SSH into my iMac for testing.

 

[Dave00]

Well, I tried that, to no avail. It looks like I setup both users as Admin. It gave me "operation not permitted" when I tried to chmod. So I tried sudo chmod; gave me the dire warnings, then it appeared to plow through the files, but when I tried to modify them again, same problem.

I finally made duplicates of each file; the duplicate files do not have the permissions problem. I'm going to have to get rid of that other user now, any way to do that?

Dave