I updated my 2017 iMac from High Sierra to Big Sur. The updater failed (repeatedly; putting me into Recovery mode) and eventually I did a reformat of the internal Fusion drive, which I did properly in order to retain the Fusion part, then I installed Big Sur.

I then manually copied a backup of my User folder from an external drive to the Users folder on the Big Sur install (Applications from a backup were not manually moved but rather I will reinstall as needed). I next changed permissions on my User folder to Read & Write (from Read only). I could not change to “Apply to enclosed items…”. Then I changed permissions on my Desktop folder from Read only to Read & Write followed by “Apply to enclosed items…” which was (apparently) successfully applied.

Everything seems to work as before I updated except I cannot move old files into old folders without being required to enter an admin password. And if I move an old folder into another old folder, it is copied to the target folder, not simply moved. Same password requirement to drag a file or folder to the Trash (except it doesn’t duplicate the contents of a folder, it trashes it after I enter my admin password).

With newly created files and folders I do not have to enter my admin password to move to either a new or old folder which is the behavior I want for all my User files and folders, old and new, or at least all those in my Desktop folder.

I tried some Permissions and Terminal fixes I found on the web to no avail. Thanks for advice on how to fix this!

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Ps., I was tempted to try:

sudo chown my_user_name ~/. my_user_name

Except I don’t know what I am doing in Terminal.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

In cases like these I don’t copy the entire User folder. I copy the content of Documents from the external drive to the Documents on the new drive. Same with Music, Pictures, etc. So far I never ran into permission issues.

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gadje
In cases like these I don’t copy the entire User folder. I copy the content of Documents from the external drive to the Documents on the new drive. Same with Music, Pictures, etc. So far I never ran into permission issues.

Except those folders on my backup drive were mostly empty. All my files reside on my desktop and desktop subfolders.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Get the name off of your home folder.

The command is:

sudo chown -R [name on your home folder and NOT in brackets]:staff ~

So if the name on your Home folder was "speedy" you'd enter it as:
sudo chown -R speedy:staff ~

It will throw errors on some protected folders within your Home folder, but should fix the worst of it.

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I have a distrust for united fusion drives, as they fragment your files, although that may not be the culprit in this case. Have you run Disk Utility’s first aid on both drives? If not, I'd start there.

Run this (in the Script Editor), secondly.

do shell script "ls -l " & (path to desktop folder from user domain)'s POSIX path's quoted form --**

Your username should appear in the third position, beginning on line two; if so, you probably need chmod.

do shell script "chmod -R u=rw+x,g=rw+x,o=r+x " & (choose folder with prompt "Point me to a test container folder with a suspected permission problem.")'s POSIX path's quoted form

**edited to correct an extraneous end quote

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Le poète doit vivre beaucoup, vivre dans tous les sens. - Verlaine



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/30/2023 07:20PM by Marc Anthony.

Quote
Tiangou
Get the name off of your home folder.

The command is:

sudo chown -R [name on your home folder and NOT in brackets]:staff ~

So if the name on your Home folder was "speedy" you'd enter it as:
sudo chown -R speedy:staff ~

It will throw errors on some protected folders within your Home folder, but should fix the worst of it.

Tiangou, thank you for your help. I ran your command through Terminal and restarted. The Mac stopped the startup with the Apple logo on the screen. I left it there for an hour while doing other things. Then I powered it off because it had made no progress and next I restarted it. This time it started normally.

Now my Get info for old files shows:

Everyone Custom
Speedy (Me) Read & Write
Speedy (Me) Read only
staff Read only
everyone Read only


For folders Get info for old folders now shows:

Speedy (Me) Read & Write
Speedy (Me) Read only
staff Read only
everyone Read only


Newly created files and folders:

Speedy (Me) Read & Write
staff Read only
everyone Read only

The behavior requiring me to enter a password is unchanged regarding both old and new files and folders.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Quote
Marc Anthony
I have a distrust for united fusion drives, as they fragment your files, although that may not be the culprit in this case. Have you run Disk Utility’s first aid on both drives? If not, I'd start there.

Run this (in the Script Editor), secondly.

do shell script "ls -l " & (path to desktop folder from user domain)'s POSIX path's quoted form --**

Your username should appear in the third position, beginning on line two; if so, you probably need chmod.

do shell script "chmod -R u=rw+x,g=rw+x,o=r+x " & (choose folder with prompt "Point me to a test container folder with a suspected permission problem.")'s POSIX path's quoted form

**edited to correct an extraneous end quote

Marc Anthony, thank you also for your help. I ran Disk First Aid on both drives. Unfortunately, I do not know how to:

path to desktop folder from user domain

Or anything after that because it is beyond my capabilities. Or, in other words, I'm concerned I will screw it up.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Quote
Speedy
Now my Get info for old files shows:

Everyone Custom
Speedy (Me) Read & Write
Speedy (Me) Read only
staff Read only
everyone Read only

Yeah, you're there twice because you added a ACL permission for yourself on top of the UNIX (POSIX) permissions when you changed things in the Get Info window. Don't worry about it. It's simply redundant.

Quote
Speedy
Newly created files and folders:

Speedy (Me) Read & Write
staff Read only
everyone Read only

...

The behavior requiring me to enter a password is unchanged regarding both old and new files and folders.

Ownership from the Finder/GUI look fine.

I would move on to Marc Anthony's advice and work on permissions instead of ownership.

You can enter these commands in the Terminal:

sudo chflags -R nouchg ~
diskutil resetUserPermissions / ` id -u`

First one removes "lock" bits from files/folders, just in case the prompts for PW are to override a "lock."

Second one sets Home folder permissions to defaults. (If you're typing it out, note the use of the backwards single quote which sits under the ESC key... Best to copy/paste.)

If problems persist only on specific folders then it's time to look at MA's second AppleScript. It should fix the problem on a folder-by-folder basis. (Not sure why he's giving world-r/x permissions...?) The Script Editor is in the Utilities folder inside of the Applications folder. You can paste the script into the Script editor window and hit the little play-icon to execute the script.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/30/2023 09:54PM by Tiangou.

Here is a little more explanation. Copy each provided line one at a time into the Script Editor in the utilities folder and press play; path to desktop folder is a relative reference, and the first script simply lists some file properties from your desktop without making any changes, so there is nothing to mess up; if you see your name returned in the file list, then you need the chmod command—not chown.

The second script can be tested on any folder to enforce specific permissions to that folder and all its enclosed items. You choose any folder to apply it to for testing; it could be a small folder with a couple files or the entire desktop. The u bit sets the users read, write, and execution permission, just as if you had changed it in the get info window; g and o stand for group and other, respectively. In some testing I did in a folder on my own desktop, I actually needed to set the executable permission, rather than retain an existing setting, which is what +x is doing. You can change u=rw+x to u=rwx, if it doesn't initially work.

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Le poète doit vivre beaucoup, vivre dans tous les sens. - Verlaine



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/30/2023 10:16PM by Marc Anthony.

I did not fail to thank you both for your help, I just hadn't time to give you a (fairly complete) update in order to seek more help before thanking you both

Ok, here is where we are after following both of your instructions:

We can open all folders and all files which we could do all along - so no change there.

We cannot save changes we make to old files but we can save changes to newly created files (files created after I updated from High Sierra to Big Sur) which thereafter behave normally. What we have been doing is copying all the text from old files and creating a new document and pasting the copied text, then saving. It works but it is cumbersome. - so no change there. Specifically what happens is we get this dialog box:


If I press Save the file will close and then almost immediately reopen with no error message and with my changes but unsaved. I can press Don't Save then the file will close normally without saving any changes. Here is the Get Info on the file (elena is my wife):



If I manually change permissions on the 'everyone Custom' to 'everyone Read & Write' the older files can now be changed and successfully saved in a normal way (this is new behavior!). This is what the Get Info then looks like:



It is not ideal but I can live with that as no one has access to this computer but my wife and me - as long as macOS is also fine with it and otherwise will function normally.

Now, it would be very nice if I could change permissions on all the files in a folder rather than one-by-one, specifically the files in the User folder named 'elena', to 'everyone Read & Write'. If I do a 'Get Info' on a folder and click 'Apply to enclosed items...', --first changing 'everyone Read only' to 'everyone Read & Write'--:



I get this:



But unfortunately the Enclosed items' permissions in the folder are not changed to 'everyone Read & Write' so each file must still be individually changed manually through the Get Info for any particular file from 'everyone Custom' to 'everyone Read & Write'. I guess what I am seeking is help to change the permissions on all the files in the User folder 'elena' from 'everyone Custom' to 'everyone Read & Write'.

Care to have another go at this?

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

Did you attempt this variation I described above? It works like 'Apply to enclosed items' for a selected folder. Test it with a subset of copied files, rather than your entire user folder. There may be security ramifications if everyone has full access to all files, but you could change the u to o, which is everyone, as needed;I wouldn't do that for any applications.

do shell script "chmod -R u=rwx " & (choose folder with prompt "Point me to a test container folder with a suspected permission problem.")'s POSIX path's quoted form --this reads "change access recursively for user to read, write, execute"

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Le poète doit vivre beaucoup, vivre dans tous les sens. - Verlaine

Is the problem only occurring on MS Word docs now?

Word's read-only compatibility mode is for docs created in ancient (and allegedly less-secure) versions of Office/Word. Once you save-as in the new file-format (.docx instead of .doc) the problem should go away.

Did you upgrade your Office suite recently?

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