Of UIDs and GIDs and Ceiling Wax



Encountered a strange little Mac OS X gremlin on my PowerBook this weekend that I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else runs into it. I synchronized my wife's "home" folder with the contents of her home folder on our iMac, and as usual after performing an operation like this from my account, I went into the Terminal as root to set the user privileges correctly for her account. On this occasion, however, every time I tried to set the privileges for my wife's home folder, the system kept setting the privileges to the same as my home folder. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the privileges to be for my wife instead of me. And when I checked the Accounts system preference, it wouldn't let me delete her account.

After fumbling around for a while I finally decided to check an application I usually try to avoid: NetInfo Manager. Once in NIM I clicked "users" and then mine and my wife's account names to compare the settings. Everything looked fine except that we had the same UID of 501 and the same GID of 20. I figured that couldn't be right since all the other user accounts had unique values for these settings. So I changed my wife's account UID to 502 and the GID to 21. Much to my delight, that immediately cleared up the problem! Hey, who said this UNIX stuff is hard?

Posted: Mon - July 14, 2003 at 10:02 PM          

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