odd message when Repairing Permissions in Disk Utility

[Gregg Dinse]

On 4 Feb 2008, at 5:34 PM, Shawn Erickson wrote:

> On Feb 4, 2008 1:52 PM, Gregg Dinse <dinse at niehs.nih.gov> wrote:
>
>> Is any of this a problem?  Do others see this?  Are /private and /
>> Private the same thing?  If so, what should the permissions be on
>> this directory?  If not, then why doesn't disk utility fix it?
>
> HFS+ [1] is case preserving but case insensitive so /private and
> /Private are equivalent at the file system level. Likely receipts
> under /Library/Receipts have conflicting permission definitions and
> differing case. The last permissions used are the "safer" of the two
> so I don't see a real problem. In fact the latter permission change
> may be coming from a hard coded definition for that directory as a
> safety net to override a bogus receipt.
>
> -Shawn
>
> [1] <http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html>

Hi Shawn,

Thanks for the information.  You have answered my main question,  
which was whether this is a problem.  It sounds like it is not a  
problem.

I had never seen this message before.  I wonder if it's something  
that got introduced with the latest Tiger update or something that  
was created by some recent third-party software I installed.

Just out of curiosity, is there some good reason why Apple would use  
both /private and /Private for directory names?  Why not be  
consistent and stick with one or the other?

Thanks,

Gregg