[X4U] Widget permission oddities

[David Ledger]

>From: Scott McCulloch <mylists at ascottmcculloch.com>
>
>In trying out Widget Manager I discovered an oddity that appears to
>be related to the permissions of the widgets. Widget Manager will
>allow you to activate/deactivate or trash any widget that it has
>permission to, and all others will be greyed out. Well, on my mac,
>all the widgets in /Library/Widgets are accessible, and ALL of the
>widgets in ~/Library/Widgets are greyed out.
>
>So, I checked the permissions of the widget files and found:
>- the widgets in my ~/Library/Widgets folder all showed as being
>owned by me, with read/write permission, group is staff with read
>only, and other is read only
>- the widgets in my /Library/Widgets folder are all owned by system
>with read/write permissions, group is admin with read only, and other
>is read only
>
>When I delete a widget from the ~/Library/Widgets folder, I'm asked
>for the Admin password before it sends the widget to the trash.
>When I delete a widget from /Library/Widgets folder, it goes directly
>to the trash.
>
>Now I'm no expert, but this seems mighty odd to me... in fact, it
>seems backwards. Any ideas what's going on?
>
>Thanks,
>Scott

To delete a file you need to write to the containing directory. 
Unless the 't' permission bit is set on the directory, the ownership 
& mode of files is irrelevant to their deletion.

This is one reason why the file hierarchy is the way that it is - so 
that system files can be protected from deletion by putting them in a 
directory with limited write permission.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
Chair of HPUX SysAdmin SIG of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk