Odd-looking Sharing & Permissions

[2024]

I noticed recently that "wheel" is included in my Macintosh HD Sharing & Permissions. I think it must be from a time someone in Apple customer support did some work trying to figure out an issue on my iMac. Should I just delete it?

Also, why does it say "You can only read"?

FWIW, my wife's account looks the same in both regards.

 

[splifingate]

These are the Defaults for Macintosh HD.

Deletion will incur inevitable regret 🙂

Understanding and Utilizing the Linux Wheel Group

In the Linux operating system, user management is a crucial aspect of system administration. One of the key concepts in user management is the `wheel` group. The `wheel` group plays a significant role in controlling who can use the `sudo` command, which allows users to execute commands with...

linuxvox.com

Accounts are usually Administrator or User.

I daily-drive a regular User account, which I choose to not include in the 'wheel' group.

splifingate@splifingates-Mac-Studio ~ % groups splifingate
staff everyone localaccounts com.apple.sharepoint.group.1 _lpoperator com.apple.sharepoint.group.2
splifingate@splifingates-Mac-Studio ~ %

When I need Administrator/"super-user" privileges, I either switch to the Admin account, or use (in Terminal):

% su - Admin
% Password:🔐

Trust the defaults, and all will be well 🙂

 

[!!!]

I noticed recently that "wheel" is included in my Macintosh HD Sharing & Permissions. I think it must be from a time someone in Apple customer support did some work trying to figure out an issue on my iMac. Should I just delete it?

It's an account group, one that's a part of the system. It's normal.

Also, why does it say "You can only read"?

On macOS 10.15 and later, the boot drive is read-only, and only contains macOS. Thanks to a bunch of trickery, a writable "Data" volume is mounted on top of this, to allow users to use the system as normal.

That line of text is only for the folder you're inspecting, if you check out the /Users folder it will say the same thing, despite you being able to write somewhere inside of it.