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Change 'Ignore Permissions' from the command line System
For various reasons, I moved my Users directory to its own partition following Mike Bombich's excellent instructions.

Some time later, I was adding a new user to my system when I discovered that everything in the Users directory was owned by myself (the admin) and by group "unknown". Even the home directories of all other users were owned by the admin, and trying to change them with the chown command had no effect. The reason for this was that the "Ignore ownership on this volume" checkbox in the Get Info" pane was enabled on the drive that contained my Users directory.

However, I had come to this conclusion while at work, away from my machine, so I was looking for a way to restore ownerships remotely via the terminal. I found the answer on the Apple Developer site, on a page discussing disk permissions.

The command you need to use is vsdbutil. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a man page, but the syntax is fairly simple. To ignore ownerships on a volume, do:
 % sudo vsdbutil -d /VolumeName
To restore ownerships on a volume, do:
 % sudo vsdbutil -a /VolumeName
And to check the status of ownerships on a volume, do:
 % sudo vsdbutil -c /VolumeName
You must have admin privileges to execute the vsdbutil command.
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10.2 crashes
Authored by: Wojtek on Sep 25, '02 12:52:53PM

I've found a bug in 10.2 and 10.2.1 that crashes the system when trying to connect with my modem AFTER my G4 is left overnite on a sleep mode. 10.1.5 and earlier did not have this problem. Did anyone have a similar experience? Is there a way around this bug other that shutting the computer off every day?



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Change 'Ignore Permissions' from the command line
Authored by: rbsandkam on Sep 18, '08 09:20:08PM

The command is actually:

sudo vsdbutil -d /Volumes/VolumeName

At least that is my experience under 10.4 and 10.5.

I also would like to note how to do this using ARD (imagine needing to turn off permissions for every secondary drive in your lab):

Send the unix command

enter command as (no sudo): vsdbutil -d /Volumes/VolumeName

set Run Command as: User: root

click Send



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