macOS usr/local/bin

[MR_Boogy]

Well, (as may be a little obvious ) I don't really know what I want in the technical sense... from a usability standpoint I want OSX to stop asking me for a password when I alter any files in /usr/local (or subdirs), which is what happens every time I edit a file in TextEdit and try to save, or rename a file, yada yada.

Is that an ownership change or a permissions change - I suppose I want the least severe change which accomplishes this rather than doing chmod 777 as the opposite end of the spectrum!

 

[subsonix]

You change ownership with chown, the question is, what files do you have in /usr/local that you make constant changes to? If they are your own, why not use a folder in you home directory instead of /usr/local?

sudo chown `whoami` /usr/local

Changes ownership to 'you', however doing so recursively is not the best idea since there might be files in there that should not be user editable.

 

[MR_Boogy]

You change ownership with chown, the question is, what files do you have in /usr/local that you make constant changes to? If they are your own, why not use a folder in you home directory instead of /usr/local?

3rd-party Source code and build files for source code - files are fairly stable but getting things set up means some tweaking which is really annoying.

sudo chown `whoami` /usr/local

Changes ownership to 'you', however doing so recursively is not the best idea since there might be files in there that should not be user editable.

I created the dir as my "3rd-party code" dir, it didn't exist before then since it's not part of Mac OS proper.

So should I be changing the owner, or the permissions - what is better to let 'me' access this directory freely?

 

[subsonix]

3rd-party Source code and build files for source code - files are fairly stable but getting things set up means some tweaking which is really annoying.

I created the dir as my "3rd-party code" dir, it didn't exist before then since it's not part of Mac OS proper.

So should I be changing the owner, or the permissions - what is better to let 'me' access this directory freely?

What is a bit perplexing is what you just said in combination with "I don't really know what I want in the technical sense..."

But you should only change ownership if you are determined to do it and understand what it does. I also use /usr/local regularly, but I typically move files there after I'm done as it's in my $PATH, with that being said I have ownership of /usr/local but some sub-folders are owned by root as a result of install scripts (git for example). There are some different opinions about it, homebrew for example recommends to use a normal user for /usr/local. You can read a discussion about it here: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1393/are-my-permissions-for-usr-local-correct

 

[sunbirdX]

about /usr/local/bin

To me, it might be more a convenience to not already have the directory premade, because I like to put my own compiled work on a separate partition. On Linux, no problem. It just involves mounting the particular partition or separate drive at the mount point, /usr/bin/local/ ...but I am unsure of how to do it properly on mac.

Of course I can just make the directory on mac's root drive, as advised above. But how do I actually mount a different drive on the mac operating system? I see that fink does this, uses .bash_profile to set it up. But is that the same thing?