MacOS – Can’t create new directory in home folder: What are “default” permissions/ownership

macospermission

I do know how to set permissions. But what is the default OS X permission and ownership for one's home directory. I can't create a dir. How is mine different? (See snippet):

jbenniMac:~ jbenni$ pwd
/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/jbenni
jbenniMac:~ jbenni$ ls -l ..
total 0
drwxrwx---@ 101 jbenni  staff  3434 May 14 17:15 jbenni
jbenniMac:~ jbenni$ mkdir test
mkdir: test: Permission denied
jbenniMac:~ jbenni$

Also:

jbenniMac:~ jbenni$ ls -ledO@ /Users/jbenni
drwxr-xr-x+ 13 jbenni  staff  - 442 Mar  9 15:52 /Users/jbenni
 0: group:everyone deny delete

Note: 1) There are other miscellaneous symptoms. E.g., Bash complains about not being able to create a sessions folder, and I get a spurious "StartupItems" has wrong permissions at login (even though it doesn't). I suspect all these are related.

Note: 2) Long ago, and several versions of OS X ago, I installed an SSD for my system and applications. I relocated my Home directory (using the Users and Groups, "Advanced Options…", then browsing to a location on the builtin hard disk for my home directory). That's been working fine, and life is good in the Finder. I don't use Terminal often enough to know for sure when this prob. started – but Terminal has worked subsequent to the SSD/HDD separation.

Best Answer

The answer was provided by fd0 who posted it on SuperUser. The problem turns out to be caused by conflicting ACLs, and was solved by removing them all. (Apparently resetpassword as suggested above did not clear these ACLs. I don't know why.) The terminal command that revealed the conflicting ACLs was:

ls -ledO@ "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/jbenni"

The terminal command that fixed the conflict (by removing all) was: 

chmod -N "/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/jbenni"

I hope this helps someone else. I was chmod aware, but didn't have a working knowledge of ACLs - so I never would have found this on my own. Stackexchange rocks!

Related Question