Mac – False file permission denied error when opening one specific word document on the Mac

findermacms officepermission

There is one specific word doc that contains a draft SOP for running a piece of manufacturing equipment. When I select this file to open it from the Finder or from Word, I get a permission error, and "Select this file to give access to it". I select it, and then it raises the error: "User does not have permission to access this file."

Historically, I have had no problem opening this file. All the sudden, I get permission denied. I have tried selecting [CTRL] and [right click the file from Finder] and select [get info]. When I do, I get, as expected, I get: me: rwx, staff: r–, others: r–.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on?

Thanks for your time.

Best Answer

The permissions look okay. Maybe you're not (or are no longer) the owner. Try opening Terminal.app Then type: chown USER ~/Desktop/FILE replacing USER with your username, and FILE with the filename plus the extension, assuming it's on your Desktop. If you've executed the command successfully, it will seem like nothing has happened. If you fail, it will complain, but you're not going to harm anything.

Then try to open it.

Aside from that, I'd maybe you could have encrypted it by mistake?

Error code -36

-36 (ioErr) (I/O error) is a file system error, it indicates that data cannot be sent or received by the operating system. Historically, errors of this type were bummers.

Finder: source and destination

Think not only of the source (the CD); think also of the destination.

The file

What is the one file that Finder can not copy?

The file system

What type of file system is the destination? The answer will be amongst results to the following command:

mount

A volume with file system type hfs should be good for most purposes.

Depending on what you wish to copy, other types of file system may be equally good.

Disk Utility

For copying a CD in its entirety – or for imaging a file system within a CD – Disk Utility is ideal.

MacOS – AppleScript gives no permission error trying to open file, but the file can be opened manually

This problem is caused by Apple's sandboxing of applications (in this case, OmniGraffle). Preview does not receive an entitlement to access the PDF if you just pass it a string to open. From Apple's release notes:

Compatibility Notes

When sending commands to a sandboxed application, such as TextEdit in OS X Mountain Lion, parameters that refer to files must be of an explicit file-like type and not a bare string, or the target application will not be able to access the file. For example, file "Macintosh HD:Users:me:sample.txt", POSIX file "/Users/me/sample.txt", or the result of choose file would all be acceptable, but the string "/Users/me/sample.txt" would not.

Why does this sometimes work? When you open a file manually, the application retains the entitlement to open it (in Recents, for instance). Therefore, if you try any file you've opened already, odds are it will work, but it won't work on new files.

To fix, change your code to read:

...
    set srcFileRef to (open POSIX file srcFileString)
...