![]() Now in the case of your printer driver, it looks to me like the developers used the phrase "repairing permissions" for a stage of the install which likely changes the driver file owner so that it's owned by the print server application on your Mac. Or an update might come along and the new version of the app installs with slightly different permissions. But after you run the app for the first time it may need to elevate its permissions. The trick is though, that there may be good reasons for permissions to change - e.g.: when you first install an app it may have one set of permissions (owner: you, group: staff, readable, writeable, executable). If there's a difference, Disk Utility changes the permissions back to the original setting. The Repair Permissions feature in Disk Utility goes through the system files as well as any apps you may have installed one-by-one, and compares their current permissions with a record of the permissions set when the app was originally installed. So Apple built a repair permissions feature into Disk Utility and it has been there ever since. If you had both OS X and Mac OS 9 installed (for dual-booting), it was possible that OS 9 (which did not have a concept of Unix-style file permissions) could inadvertently alter the permissions on some of the OS X files. Permissions being which user/group owns a file, and whether it's readable/writable/executable by the owner, group and every other account on the system.Ī little history: Repair permissions was originally introduced in OS X back when OS X was in beta and most Mac users ran the *old* non-Unix MacOS operating system. File system permissions are nothing magical and it can be (and is) entirely normal for the permissions of a file to change over its lifetime. It's often treated as some sort of magical voodoo cure-all, or curse, depending on who is posting. If you don't want to read all of this, just jump down to the last paragraph or two at the bottom of this post.įirst, a quick aside: as a unix sysadmin with nearly 30 years of experience under my belt, it's *extremely* painful to read posts in Mac support forums about "repairing permissions". If you don't mind, I'm going to go on a bit of rant here about repair permissions (mostly in response to the rather alarmist post by Robert_James_The_Third). ![]() ![]() Meaning printer or gutenprint drivers did something, hacked in and now you need to do clean install because your mac is hijacked by trojans. Not any other app using repair permissions. It talks about disk permissions function. The Repair Disk Permissions function-the process that actually performs the task of repairing permissions-examines certain files and folders on your Mac’s hard drive to see if their current permissions settings are what Mac OS X expects them to be if discrepancies are found, the offending permissions are changed to match the expected settings. If permissions on particular files are “incorrect”-i.e., not what Mac OS X expects them to be or not what they need to be for your Mac’s normal operation-you can experience problems when the operating system tries to access or modify those files. But permissions also determine which items the operating system-or specific parts of it-can access and modify, and which files are accessible by applications. For example, permissions dictate whether or not a particular user can open and edit a particular file. Every file and folder on a Mac OS X hard drive has a set of permissions -settings that determine which user(s) have access to each item, and exactly what that access is. ![]()
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