I’m running OS 10.2.3 on a powerbook G4. For some reason or other, my machine starting locking up spontaneously and at random, requiring a restart. I created a new login and switched to that, which seems to have solved the problem. But now my login doesn’t have read/write access to many of my files, particularly preference files. I can change the permissions on files one-at-a-time in the Applications Info window, but that is very tedious. Is there some way to effectively give all the permissions of my old login to my new login at once?
I’ve never had to do this, but I hear BatChmod is good and it sounds like what you need.
Another option is xFiles. I’ve never used it for the specific purpose you describe, but it does have the capacity to do batch-permission changes.
Also, BrickHouse and MacJanitor by the same programmer are very handy to have around. Look into 'em.
If you’re not afraid of the terminal, you can do it with the Terminal program:
sudo chmod -R 700 ~user
This will make the whole folder read/write/execute for the owner, but nobody else – check out “man chmod” in the terminal for other values. For example, you may want to do sudo chmod -R 740 ~user/Shared for your shared folder, or sudo chmod -R 702 ~user/DropBox if you want to create a write-only dropbox.
Also, consider:
sudo chown -R user ~user
which will ensure that “user” is the owner of everything in “~user” – the permissions may be okay, but somehow the owner may have gotten messed up.