- Utilities
- Why Permissions in the First Place?
- Who's Your Daddy?
- Summary
Who's Your Daddy?
There is an obvious trail to this concept hiding in the disk information that is displayed in the Finder. If you look at the Get Info dialog box for a Firewire disk plugged into your machine, you notice the following check box: Ignore Ownership On This Volume. That means that on that disk every user can access every file; that is, each user that looks at a file will "own" it.
Now, let's say you wanted to perform some file manipulation (such as copying it or backing it up) on a file you own that required becoming the root user to perform the action. root would then own that file while the manipulation occurred, and the new/copied file would think it was owned by root—who created it. After you go back to being the administrative user, you are no longer 'root'. But because of this promiscuous ownership, the new file may still think 'root' is its daddy and won't give it up for you even if you owned the original file.
The simplest solution to this problem is to invoke terminal, become root (say the magic password!) and play with the chown command until everything is as it should be.
And that, kids, is why you need simple Unix skills in OS X to this day.