Yesterday I looked at using diskutil to repair the permissions on a boot volume. You can also use diskutil to repair the permissions on a non-booted volume provided that there is a valid Mac OS X installation on that volume. To do so you would simply provide the path to that volume rather than to the blessed boot volume. For example, if the disk that we mentioned in the previous article were called Seldon and it was in a host booted to target disk mode then you would simply provide the path /Volumes/Seldon as before:
diskutil repairPermissions /Volumes/Seldon
In the event that you are scripting and want to take into account a dynamic target you can use a positional parameter or create the script on the fly. If you will then be using a package to choose a destination folder you can send a variable to the script and you would then use $1 in the place of /Volumes/Seldon, indicating a positional parameter. For example, a script might appear as follows:
#!/bin/bash
diskutil repairPermissions $1
This is how Mike Bombich used to summon repair permissions in NetRestore (if memory serves then his script is practically identical to the one I list here but I’m on a flight can’t cross-reference ’cause I’m still too cheap to get a GoGo account). In watching his scripts mature, I picked up running a repairPermissions as a post-flight deployment task. Since doing so I’ve noticed a slight decrease in the amount of troublesome hosts deployed to the tune of maybe 1 out of 40 imaging projects per year. If the volume name is identical across all hosts then this can be as simple as listing the first command above. If the volume will be a boot volume then you can use the bless command, as indicated yesterday, to grab the volume name.
