Terminal Tips: Repair Your Permissions

By C.K. Sample, III

This one is a simple one. Sure you can do this via Disk Utility or a variety of OS X maintenance programs like Cocktail, but I find that doing it via the command line version of Disk Utility, diskutil, is much easier and quicker. Launch your Terminal, located in /Applications/Utilities/, and type:

sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

and hit return. You will be prompted for an administrator password. Enter it. Now watch the read out to see what permissions are being fixed and where. When it is finished, you will be returned to the command prompt. 

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