What happens to a machine if someone never repairs permissions?

[decocritter]

Does the machine operate correctly? But slow?

[jdc]

I never repair mine. Or maybe once every 6 months.

mac at this office probably never, since I dont have admin privledges.

Seems fine.

[Panopticon]

I only mess with it when creating a test drive on my fauxMac.
And that's only because I'm installing/deleting kexts, etc. Either do it
via CL or use OSX86Tools.app; I never use DU to fix permissions.

Though not related to disk permissions, this article has some interesting
info on OS X's maintenance.

[bazookaman]

oooooo...someone's eating breakfast on the wildside

[rz]

If there is a problem with permissions, it's not going to "slow down" your machine. What might happen is that a program, or part of it, won't run properly. Or you might not have any issues at all.

When I used to run it, I noticed that a lot of times it would say permissions were incorrect on certain files. But they didn't, or wouldn't affect normal use of the program. It might say that "others" (users who aren't either the owner of the program, or in the same group as the owner) has write permission enabled, when they shouldn't have. Does that affect me? No.

[space-time]

you don't have permissions

[NewtonMP2100]

.......it stays BROKE'D......like on that *****back Mountain......????

[RAMd®d]

Maybe something.

Some people here say repairing permissions is a waste of time. They may be right, some of the time.

Regardless, there have been a few times where a program starts acting weird, and DW, First Aid, reboot, Safe Boot, and sacrificing a chicken don't fix it. Yet repair permissions and violin! It just works.

That's happened to me enough times that I made sure I tried all the standard voodoo first before I went to the Repair Permissions Santería.

I don't RP on a regular basis anymore, but if something goes wacky and a reboot doesn't fix it, then I'll RP. Sometimes that works.

[Chakravartin]

Repairing permissions sets permissions back to their default state on certain system files. Since almost all of these files are seldom if ever modified there's almost no risk of permissions being set incorrectly for them.

Moreover, permissions get changed from their original settings during OS updates. And they're supposed to be changed. That's not an error, but it's reported in the Disk Utility when a permissions-repair is run and people often think that the report is about an error.

Then they freak out. "Oh god!! My permissions have changed!! My computer is all messed up!!"

But it's not a big deal at all.

And even if permissions were somehow changed by accident on one of those system files, the odds are that you'll never experience a symptom from that. There are a lot of files in the OS and a lot of redundancy. Worst thing you're likely to experience is a repetitive log entry in the Console.

Years and years ago when the Mac OS was young, Apple's installer app sometimes messed up a few permissions on a folder n the path to a new file. That was eliminated by Panther. And Tiger made the OS much more robust to the point where permissions errors practically vanished.

So don't worry about permissions errors. They're just not a "thing" anymore.

[rz]

I decided to "Verify System Privileges" and see what it said. Here's an example, with explanation:


Permissions differ on "Applications/Utilities/AirPort Utility.app/Contents/version.plist", should be -rw-r--r-- , they are -rw-rw-r-- .

What this says is that in the Airport Utility app, a preference file has the "wrong" permission. It says the owner should have read and write privilege, other members of the owner's group, and everyone else, should only have read privilege. But instead, other members of the owner's group can read and write to this file. Not a big deal. There were a ton of similar issues in the Airport Utility app. Several were graphics files (png's) that had similar "wrong" privileges. The list looks scary because there are so many (over 200). But none of them were really a problem.