by: George Starcher, Associate Editor

Hi everyone. Some of us with Leopard have run into a problem where Finder crashes if we try and modify user permissions on a folder.  Today when I got home I saw in my news reader that Ted Landau with Macworld posted a fix. The solution does work. I had the problem and it fixed it for me.

However… I am very lazy. So let’s do Ted’s fix Automator style. I have like 6 user accounts on my mac. Don’t ask… We all know I am a geek.

Here is a screen shot of my Automator to do this fix. You will need to be running as an admin user to do this.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

We cheat, we rely on the Users folder to gather our short user names.

1. Just drag and drop the Users folder from your mac harddrive into the Automator. That will create the first action.
2. Next drag the Files&Folders->Get Folder Contents action over to your stack.
3. Next drag the Utlities->Run Shell Script action over to your stack, change the Pass Input pulldown to “as arguments”
4. Paste in the following script code (I just added a loop and the sudo trick around Ted’s code)
   

   for f in “$@”
   do
   name=`basename “$f”`
   echo “yourPasswordhere” | sudo -S dscl . create /Groups/$name GroupMembership $name
   echo “yourPasswordhere” | sudo -S dscl . change /Groups/$name RecordName $name _$name
   done

5. Replace the text phrase in the script yourPasswordhere with your real user password. We are not saving this so it is not a security risk of keeping our password around in plain text.
6. Click Run. It should run successfully and perform the fix as explained by Ted. It sure worked for me.

If you don’t mind a hack and need the fix right away this should do it for you. No matter how many user accounts you have.