Apple Notes

If you’re an OS X or macOS user with half a clue you’ll know that jumping into the application Disk Utility and hitting the ‘Repair Permissions’ button can drag your operating system drive back towards peak performance. But what exactly do file permissions pertain to?

OK, here’s the deal. If you select a file or folder in macOS and choose ‘Get Info’ from the control-click menu, you’ll see a section at the bottom of the window entitled ‘Sharing & Permissions’. write, and which processes have access to those abilities. Those processes can be the system itself, the admin user, or any users with access via sharing. As you’d imagine, should any files or folders end up with incorrect permission settings, the operating system will become confused when trying to write to or read from those incorrectly set files. If those files are designed to be accessed by the operating system and the system is denied access, the system is going to start unravelling. Fonts may appear incorrectly, virtual RAM space may get thwarted, and general usage will begin to slow or even fail to launch applications.