Ownership & Permissions Q

[Wie Gehts]

Hi.

I'm always confused about in the 'get info' panel, the owner and group listings.
Under 'details', whats the difference between having it set to 'system' rather than my user account name?

Looking through some stuff in my application folder, some things seem to be set to my user name, others to 'system'. As I never really touched these, they are whatever default when installed.

Thanks

 

[Dalton63841]

This is where a bit of Unix background comes in handy. In a nutshell, Any files that you have ownership of, you can pretty much do whatever with without needing authorization. However another user cannot touch them. Files whose owner is System, require Root authorization.

Wheel, or staff, refer to the group that the owner belongs to, more or less.

Bear in mind that what you see in Get Info is a little higher level than real Unix permissions, but are more or less the same.

 

[Wie Gehts]

Thanks. I notice, for example, the 'group' for most of my stuff, is set to 'admin', while as I say, some things the 'owner' is set to either 'system' or my user name.

However, I happen to look at the get info for my system prefs, and it says 'wheel' under group, as you happen to mention that name.

This all came to my mind because for some reason in the past year, every time I use airport admin utility to do a re-config, it keeps asking me for the password even though I check off 'save to keychain' all the time.
It never used to ask me. Something changed, and I thought it might be this permissions thing.
However, just to see, I changed ownership from 'system' to my user name, which says I can read and write, and kept group to 'admin', but that didn't seem to work. But this is another issue from this thread kinda.

 

[Darth.Titan]

Thanks. I notice, for example, the 'group' for most of my stuff, is set to 'admin', while as I say, some things the 'owner' is set to either 'system' or my user name.

However, I happen to look at the get info for my system prefs, and it says 'wheel' under group, as you happen to mention that name.

This all came to my mind because for some reason in the past year, every time I use airport admin utility to do a re-config, it keeps asking me for the password even though I check off 'save to keychain' all the time.
It never used to ask me. Something changed, and I thought it might be this permissions thing.
However, just to see, I changed ownership from 'system' to my user name, which says I can read and write, and kept group to 'admin', but that didn't seem to work. But this is another issue from this thread kinda.

That issue is unrelated to permissions. However it might be the result of a corrupted Keychain.

 

[Wie Gehts]

That issue is unrelated to permissions. However it might be the result of a corrupted Keychain.

Thanks. I assume theres a keychange prefs. If there is and I trashed it, would that help? Would I then loose all my saved chains?