MacOS – What should the home folder permissions look like

macospermission

I'm trying to figure out the best permissions configuration for my home folder in Sierra.

Would executing this make sense:

sudo chown -v -R $(whoami) ~/* && sudo chown -v -R $(whoami) ~/.*; 
sudo find ~/.* -type f -print -exec chmod -v -R 640 {} \;
sudo find ~/.* -type f -print -exec chmod -v -R 750 {} \;

I'm looking for everything to work, but I want to restrict access as much as possible. My permissions were set to read-only to "Everyone" (no idea why).

Best Answer

My home folder's permissions look like this (drwxr-xr-x+):

Home folder permissions

However, folders inside my home folder (like Desktop) look like this (drwx------+):

Desktop permissions

Ultimately, the best permissions for your home folder are likely the defaults. As long as everything inside your folder is restricted, you'll be okay. Apple also doesn't recommend changing the permissions for your home folder. If you really want to, though, you can try it out and just use the following Terminal command to reset the permissions:

diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`
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