Let me guess, you tried to change the ownership of all files on the volume,
not just the document files, right? You are dead. You will need to do a
clean install, if you are lucky.
Unix is a very different beast than MacOS. Unix was originally developed in
spare time by some researchers at AT&T. While they did some interesting
work, operating system design (and programming language design) were clearly
not their main expertise - technically both Unix and the companion language
C have many shortcomings, even for systems designed in the 1970s. One of the
major weaknesses is the security scheme, which is what has cause the problem
described below. However, the source was easily available and cheap, which
made it a popular system at universities. It was never intended for use by
other then experienced professionals (and one may argue it really was never
intended to be used beyond a couple of PDP 11/70s at AT&T in the mid to late
1970s).
Until the release of Mac OS X, Unix has been restricted to professionally
administered systems, skilled hobbists, and embedded systems. In those
contexts, the different "domains" make a lot of sense, and much of the
system depends on these different domains being set up correctly. Apple has
done a very good job of protecting those domains from accidental changes -
but they are not absolute protections (nor were the protections in earlier
versions of MacOS; people could still drag the finder and system to the
trash).
In my opinion though, the failure here is with the "Super Get Info" utility,
not with Apple. The dangers of unrestricted changes to ownership (especially
to setuid files) are obvious to any skilled developer, and the application
should have been designed to be aware of the different domains, and give
appropriate warnings.
on 01.8.24 7:50 PM, Roger Turpin at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I used "Super Get Info" a few weeks ago to try to get past this whole
> privileges thing, and Eric is right. My system became unbootable, even a
> reinstall wouldn't work.
--
Eric Hildum
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