On 06 Sep 2014, at 02:01 , Doug Barton <[email protected]> wrote: > I am new to OS X, but familiar with Unix systems. I was trying to install > homebrew, and it sets the permissions for /usr/local as 0775, owned by > root:admin.
Are you sure? /usr/local is 755 here and the group is wheel. > The theory being that since I'm in the admin group (confirmed by running both > 'id' and 'groups') I should be able to write to that directory. Not exactly, no. Nothing is written right to /usr/local/, but rather to the sub directories like /usr/local/bin/ /usr/local/lib/ &c. > The problem is that I can't, I get a 'permission denied' error. I tried > recreating the situation in various other places in the tree, same results. > If I set the group ownership to my personal group (which also happens to be > the first one listed for 'id' or 'groups') then it works. If the group > ownership is anything other than my personal group (i.e., any of the others > in the list after the first) then I cannot write to the directory. > > I'm running a fairly plain vanilla 10.9.4 system, there are no ACLs on /, > /usr/, or /usr/local, or any of the other locations I tried testing. I have > homebrew working, so that's not really my issue. I'm trying to understand the > problem more generally, and hopefully to find a solution. The command you want is 'sudo' which allows you, as the admin, to run commands as root without knowing/setting a root password. The instructions for home-brew should be something like sudo brew install slrn (I don't use home-brew, so don't know its syntax. I seem to recall it takes the 'brew' metaphor to silly extremes I think 'keg' is a command, and maybe cellar. I use macports which is very similar to the ports in FreeBSD). > FWIW, Sophos Anti-Virus is running on this system, That seems silly. -- 'I warn you, dragon, the human spirit is-' They never found out what it was, or at least what he thought it was, although possibly in the dark hours of a sleepless night some of them might have remembered the subsequent events and formed a pretty good and gut-churning insight, to whit, that one of the things sometimes forgotten about the human spirit is that while it is, in the right conditions, noble and brave and wonderful, it is also, when you get right down to it, only human. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
