I know this is an old thread, but it comes up high in the google search results, so I'm adding my answer for OSX 10.14. The ACL prevents the user from deleting or renaming the default folders.Īn unintuitive but maybe safer(?) alternative is described at OS X Daily: Repair user permissions in Mac OS X Lion Please read the entire post from there but the commands are: chmod -R -N ~Ĭhmod +a "everyone deny delete" ~/ ~/Desktop ~/Documents ~/Downloads ~/Library ~/Movies ~/Music ~/Pictures ~/Public It proposes the solution of removing all ACL from home directory and restoring the ACLs for some default folders. There is a related discussion at Apple Discussion Forums, Lion Permissions Problem. Finder will not show all ACL information. To show also the extended ACLs when looking at the problem. the folders containing the problematic files.~/Library/Containers – see Unsaved Files in OS X Lion.I was able to fix the problem for CleanWriterPro by removing extended ACL from the affected directories (Documents, Desktop): $ chmod -R -N Desktop Documentsįor others with the same problem, I'd suggest checking the permissions of at least the following places: The question is: what are all the places I need to check to fix this problem? I don't know what introduced that ACL, Finder? How can I remove it? grant:~ joneskoo $ ls -led Documents/ĭrwxr-xr-x+ 44 joneskoo staff 1496 Jan 17 06:55 Documents/ Techrepublic: Introduction to OS X access control lists. Possibly related: I can't even rename files in Finder now under Documents without typing my password. I could not reproduce the problem in Numbers now. However, CleanWriterPro is still not able to save the file in Documents, even though I repeated the step for Documents and Desktop. Since Library is hidden in Lion, it needs to be made visible before the permissions can be fixed in Finder: chflags nohidden ~/LibraryĪfter unhiding the Library, I opened the Get Information for Library, clicked the lock and selected "Apply to enclosing items" so that all files in Library made owned by me and no permissions for others. Grant:Library joneskoo $ ls -lad Autosave\ Information/ĭrwx- 2 root staff 68 Autosave Information/ I found one possible culprit for this problem for me: grant:Library joneskoo $ pwd I think this must be some kind of problem with AutoSave permissions but despite googling with the error, I have not yet figured out what's wrong. Permissions to the file are set up correctly according to Finder. This time the error is from CleanWriterPro, but I have also received it from Numbers and TextEdit. To save the file, I need to Duplicate it each time, which is very painful. The error is not helpful at all because it does not point to where I don't have permission.