Repair permissions was unceremoniously removed from OS X in El Capitan. This staple of the Mac gurus toolkit disappeared. There was no 21 gun salute, there was no flaming casket sent out to sea and there was no sweet, sweet wake to get drunk at. Instead, there was pain. There was pain, because when the button disappeared, the need did not. Need proof? If you haven’t yet run it, let’s check your system to verify the permissions of the standard packages: sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --verify --standard-pkgs --volume / In the above command, we used the repair_packages binary, which has not changed in awhile. We then feed that the –verify option and the…
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Repair Permissions From The Command Line
I’ve long been a supporter of building tools in self service portals such as those provided by JAMF and Munki to provide users who don’t have administrative permissions to perform tasks that wouldn’t typically otherwise be destructive. One such example is a simple repair permissions. An administrator can simply open Disk Utility, select their disk and then click Repair Disk Permissions But if you want to do this as a user who doesn’t have administrative privileges you would need to elevate your privileges before doing so. In a larger environment this would be incredibly annoying for dozens, hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of users to bring their computer…
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More repairPermissions
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…
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Verifying & Repairing Permissions
Disk Utility has a nifty little button to Verify Disk Permissions and another to Repair Disk Permissions. Many use this frequently over the course of basic Mac OS X troubleshooting. The underlying functionality is also exposed at the command line. Diskutil (located in /usr/sbin) has the verifyPermissions and repairPermissions, which roughly correspond to the buttons in Disk Utility. Because these can be run against different disks, each will need the volume indicated following the verb. For example, to run a Verify Disk Permissions against a volume called Seldon, you would use the following command: diskutil verifyPermissions /Volumes/Seldon To then run a Repair Disk Permissions on that same volume, you would…