Finder – How to Put Files Outside the Home Folder on Catalina

If you create (or rename) a folder at the root, OS X will ask for your password. This is because you do not own the root folder. Once the folder exists, you can copy (or add) as many files and folders to it without having to enter a password. In terms of permissions, the only difference, between such a folder and your home folder, is the home folder has an Access Control List (ACL). Entering the command ls -led ~ in a terminal window results in listing the home folder's permissions. On my computer running OS X 10.10.4, I get the following output.

Davids-iMac:/ davidanderson$ ls -lde ~
drwxr-xr-x+ 20 davidanderson  staff  680 Aug  6 21:51 /Users/davidanderson
 0: group:everyone deny delete

The ACL is group:everyone deny delete. I assume denying everyone delete permission prevents the deletion of your home folder.

One small point, normally your files are assigned to the group named staff. If you create a folder in the root folder, the group will be wheel instead of staff. You can correct this by typing the command chgrp staff /newfolder after creating the folder. Substitute your folder name for newfolder.

You should avoid using SMB on OS X (IMHO) as it has been buggy since the days of Snow Leopard (10.6), for me at least.

A quick Google search limited to this year alone brings up a myriad of issues regarding OS X and slow SMB implementations.

There are a few things you can try:

• Use the SMB2 protocol by mounting your share cifs://<whatever your share name is>
• Enable AFP (Netatalk) on your Ubuntu server and connect to the mount points using afp://<whatever your share name is>
• Setup NFS on Ubuntu and mount them on OS X

Personally, if I have found CIFS good, AFP better, and NFS (even though it's much older) to be the best in terms of performance.