‘Floating’ Ownership

Dave Nanian of Shirt Pocket — the software company behind the excellent SuperDuper disk duplicator/backup utility — writes about an interesting consequence of Mac OS X’s optional ability to ignore file permissions on FireWire drives: the permissions on files you create on such drives “float”, meaning they appear to be owned by whomever is looking at them. This can lead to problems if they’re “looked at” by software running as root, such as SuperDuper.

★ Monday, 25 April 2005