PatchLog

This post will show you how to enable or disable permissions on a HFS+ volume and also how to check if a volume had the permissions enabled or not.

By default when you create a HFS+ filesystem it will have the permissions/owners disabled. I'm using a macmini for backing up files from a linux system and if I want the backup to be fully consistent with the source I need filesystem permissions.

Another problem is that using rsync between a permission based and a non permission based filesystem is useless because all files will always be out of sync.

Check permissions

vsdbutil  -c  /Volumes/YourVolume

it will "Permissions on '/Volumes/YourVolume' are enabled ( or disabled ) of just "No entry found for '/Volumes/YourVolume'" which means the permissions are disabled.

Enable Permissions

vsdbutil  -a  /Volumes/YourVolume

Disable Permissions

Since permissions are disabled by default I don't see many wanting to disable permissions but here's how you can do it anyway:

vsdbutil  -d  /Volumes/YourVolume

I guess this is really useful only when you want to distribute a dmg image which currently has permissions enabled.
Distributing images with permissions enabled doesn't make much sense because the user that will open the image may have a different id then the user id that owns the files in the image so he may not be able to access the files inside the image.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 1:18 pm and is filed under MacOSX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.