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Something newer Mac / OS X users may not be aware of is the value of performing a periodic “Repair Permissions” activity on your OS X boot disk.

Why would I? Isn’t OS X infallible?

Despite what I told you in the past, OS X is not perfect. saying it was perfect was merely a tactic I used to convince you to buy a mac.

When experiencing random strangeness, failures, slowdown, apps crashing, application hangs, gremlins, daemons crashing, pieces of sky falling, running a “Repair Permissions” is a good idea..

Why did I, Rick Shangle, just do a “Repair Permissions” within the last 30 minutes?

In my case, wholesale freezing of the Finder on boot… EVERY BOOT. Some apps could load, some would load and hang, some would load and crash. Some would run fine and crash. Profound strangeness. This followed a reboot prompted by getting a “fork: cannot spawn process” event in the Terminal, which led me to believe a) I had runaway processes b) procfs was severely trashed or c) some other onerous event was happening. That’s neither here nor there.

Finally I logged in not as “me”, but as an empty/default admin account I keep on the system called “backdoorman”. There, the hanging Finder problem was not evident, and I was able to run Disk Utility ==> Repair Permission (see process below).

Note: I really recommend the empty/default admin account thing, as well. Without it, I’d probably be searching for a 10.4 DVD to boot from, and since i throw away / shred all CDs/DVDs within moments of loading any software on them, such an activity would probably require a trip to the Apple store (which, fortunately, is 1mile from my new home).

What does “Repair Permissions” do?

You know, other than what I can infer by the name (repairing permissions on key system executable / resource files), I really have no idea. Go Google it.

How did the “permissions” get in need of “repair”?

That is an excellent question. You know, I don’t know the answer to that either, just that it happens sometimes.

Maybe rebooting too much. Maybe rebooting not enough. Maybe running Azereus, a Bittorrent client that seems to have no limits with regard to the amount of havoc it causes on my system.

Who can say?

How does one “Repair Permissions”?

a) Load Applications => Utilities => Disk Utility

b) Click on your boot disk in the left pane

c) Click “Repair Permissions” button below the main pane.

d) Wait, hope, pray something good will happen.

e) Repeat periodically, like flossing.

How long does it take to “Repair Permissions”?

Couple of minutes, usually. Unless something horrible happens.

I just ran “Repair Permissions”, and it did something. Then I ran it again, and it appeared to do something (the same thing) again. Why?

It’s just how it is. Such is the mystery of “repair permissions”.

Would one ever just do the “Verify Permissions” activity, say, before doing a “Repair Permissions”?

Not that I can see, no. Unless you are a huge nerd.

Is the .Mac “Backup 3.x” product a worthless piece of tripe that will lead to a false sense of data security, followed by inevitable data loss?

Sadly yes, it is the case. rsync + cron, or rsnapshot. You’re running UNIX, folks. Take advantage of it. Tar, if you need to. cpio.

Next chapter: manually reloading netinfo databases from a backup.

rds