Instructions:
- Move the Eudora Folder to a central location. I chose /Shared/"Eudora Folder"
- In the Documents folder of each user, set up an alias to the central Eudora Folder. I simply Command-Option dragged the Eudora folder to the proper locations. You end up with /Users -> username -> Documents -> "Eudora Folder," which is the alias.
- The command to change the owner is:
chown -R username path/to/central/Eurora/Folder>
It is easiest to put this line in a shell script. I used "John Doe" as the user who is going to be made the owner of the Eudora Folder:#!/bin/sh
Notice that I have moved my Users directory to a different partition. The standard location is /Users. I called my shell script "setUpEudora". You now have a shell script which will make johndoe the owner of the Eudora Folder (once you set the execute bit). However, it will not work as is. If you were to run this from Terminal, you would have to type...
# this script changes the owner of the Eudora Folder to John Doe
echo "Changing Eudora Folder owner to John Doe..."
chown -R johndoe /Volumes/Operator/Users/Shared/Eudora\ Folder
echo "Done!"sudo chown -R johndoe /Volumes/Operator/Users/Shared/Eudora Folder
... because Unix prevents normal users from reassigning file ownership. To make this work automatically, and without sudo, do the following...
- Make the script setUID and set the shell script's permissions to rwxr-xr-x:
chmod 4755 /path/to/setUpEudora/
- Change the owner of setUpEudora to root. I used X-Ray for this, but the command...
sudo chown root /path/to/setUpEudora
... will work. Be prepared to enter your administrator password when asked. You now have a shell script which will change the ownership of the Eudora Folder when you run it in Terminal. There are a couple more steps to make this even easier to use...
- Create an AppleScript with the command:
do shell script /path/to/setUpEudora
Compile this script as an application, and set it to not bring up a startup screen. I called my application "MakeEudoraMine". We are almost done now.
- Go to the System Preferences -> Login Items, and choose MakeEudoraMine to startup at login.
To allow Jane Doe to also have access to the Eudora Folder, she needs the three items, too. Have Jane login, then:
- First, make her an alias of the Eudora Folder.
- Make her a version of the shell script with "janedoe" substituted for "johndoe". Set the file permissions as before.
- Make her a copy of the AppleScript, with the correct path to Jane's copy of MakeEudoraMine.
- Set the applescript to run on login, as before.
- I hesitated using setUID, because there is a potential for a security breach with these kinds of programs. I am still new to UNIX, so maybe there is a better way to accomplish this. If anyone has a better idea, please let us all know.
- If you don't want to use AppleScript, you can "source" the path to the shell script to the .tcshrc, but some people may not want to deal with the Terminal.
- I had trouble getting the Applescript application to launch. It kept on failing with -1408 and -1440 errors. The way I got it to work was to play around with different application settings (require OS 9, show splash screen), delete these files, then empty the trash. Finally, it worked. Seems like a bug in Applescript to me.

