odd message when Repairing Permissions in Disk Utility

[Macs R We]

On Feb 5, 2008, at 1:00 PM, macosx-talk-request at omnigroup.com wrote:


> Repairing permissions for “Macintosh HD”
> Determining correct file permissions.
> Group differs on ./Private, should be 80, group is 0
> Permissions differ on ./Private, should be drwxrwxr-x , they are
> drwxr-xr-x
> Owner and group corrected on ./Private
> Permissions corrected on ./Private
> Group differs on ./private, should be 0, group is 80
> Permissions differ on ./private, should be drwxr-xr-x , they are
> drwxrwxr-x
> Owner and group corrected on ./private
> Permissions corrected on ./private
>
> Permissions repair complete
>
> The privileges have been verified or repaired on the selected volume
> ********************************************************************** 
> **
> *******
>
> When it finishes, the above message makes it sound as if a few minor
> things have been repaired, but if I run Repair Permissions again, I
> get the same message.

> 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?

I used to see a message like this all the time under Jaguar: it used  
to correct the permissions of man/more one way, then correct the  
permissions of man/less back the other way.  The problem was that one  
of these files was actually nothing but a hard link to the other, so  
Jaguar's database of the "proper" permissions should not have had  
entries saying that they were supposed to have different permissions.

I suspect that the operating system IS operating in a case- 
insensitive fashion (which is correct) and that somehow you have a  
database of "proper" permissions that has two entries: one for / 
private, and another for /Private.  Since they are in fact the same  
directory, Disk Utility first "corrects" it one way, then "corrects"  
it back.  The proper fix is to remove the redundant entry for / 
Private, figure out who created it, and send them a nastygram.

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