Freelance Badger

Running OSX 10.4.11 on an Imac and suddenly today I get this problem:

Can no longer move stuff around desktop or into trash

Get told I don't have permission - sometimes a box comes up to put in my password and then nothing happens - says desktop cant be modified -

Finder requires you type your password (never needed to do that before just to move stuff on desktop) I put in password (the correct one, because if I try something different it tells me it's wrong!) and then get

That operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privalages for some of the items

I'm the only one on the Mac - and owned it from new, set it up myself etc etc

Freelance Badger

Sorted. Somehow (and I've no idea how) the desktop was 'locked' but I've managed to unlock it. Quite chuffed with myself although no idea why it locked itself in the first place!

SC008Y_MAD

iTrader: (5)

I would like to know to as I am also running Tiger, although not for much longer.

Where is Marcus when you need his advice?

Markus

Sorry chaps, been away for a few weeks, got back yesterday and have been catching up, so missed this one first thing this morning.

OS X, as it's based on *nix, allows you to have different ownership and permissions on folders and files. It sounds as though the "Desktop" folder, found at the root of the users Home folder, had it's permissions/ownership changed (hard to say without seeing what it was set to initially). This can be done via the "Get Info" command, you'll see the Sharing and Permissions section.

An application may also have modified things when installing, I've seen this in the past, and basically the permissions get changed so the owner user, ie; yourself, does not have read/write access to a folder, in this case the desktop. Thus trying to move anything to/from the Desktop fails.

The reason for the request for admin name and password is that the Finder will try and escalate permissions to see if the item can be moved, but in some cases it cannot, hence why you saw the message saying it could not be completed.

Usually when I see stuff like this I go all uber-geek and jump into Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/) and use the "ls -la /path/to/folder" command. This lists the structure and more importantly the ownership and permissions of the items.

From here you can use the chmod command to change the permissions to allow access, and the chown command to change the owner and/or group.

I do NOT trust the Finder's Get Info window when it comes to changing/modifying ownership and permissions, especially in 10.4. I had many occasions where I'd used this to change permissions and they did not stick, but doing it from Terminal never failed.

I would strongly suggest you also check your Documents and other folders in your Home folder to make sure you can add/remove/move things to/from them, as it might not just have been the Desktop folder that was effected.

What should the ownership and permissions be? It does depend on the folder in question, but typically I believe it should be "750" for the home folder and all sub-folders, with the owner/group set to YourUserName:staff or YourUserName:YourUserName.

750 = Read/Write for the Owner (you), Read-only for the group (typically staff or you - newer OS versions create a group with the name name as your username) and No access for "world", ie; any other user on the system.

Here is what you could try in Terminal:

ls -la /Users/ (then press return)

This will list the folders in the /Users/ folder. One of those will have the same name as the "shortname" of your user account, for example, my account name is Mark Warren, so I've a folder in /Users/ named markwarren. That's your home folder

So, if we want to set the permissions to 755 for the entire Home folder, you'd issue this command:

sudo chmod 750 /Users/shortname/ (then press return)

you'd obviously change shorname to the short name of you user account, in my case it'd be markwarren. You WILL be asked to enter a password, which is your account password, this is because we are issuing the sudo command, which basically escalates permissions to allow the command to run as the root user. This allows us to override any existing permissions that are set.

To change ownership you'd issue the following command:

sudo chown shortname:staff /Users/shortname (then press return)

Again, change shorname to your short name, and as you can see, there are two instances of shortname you need to change to your short name. Again, it'll as for the admin password, ie; your account password.

This should reset things.

Freelance Badger

Wow - very detailed reply - as I expected from you. I managed to reset everything by just using the Finder /file / get info and unclicking the locked box - which seemed to do it - but still no idea how it ticked 'itself' Have checked other folders/files and they all seem to be working fine....

Markus

Locked is an interesting option as, well, from what I recall, it's actually an extended file attribute that has to be set. In pre OS X days you'd use it to lock a file/folder, whereas now you can simply prevent read/write access to the file/folder.

Have to admit I've no idea how it would have got locked, but hey, computers are meant to do odd things from time to time, keeps us techs in jobs

Glad it was all sorted quickly though.