Command to unlock "Locked" files on OS X

I copied a lot of read-only files from a Windows system to my Mac. When viewing the Info for each file using "Get Info", I can see they are Locked. I'm writing a bash script to copy over some files and I'm getting an error that says "Operation not permitted" So, first I need to unlock the files. Since I'll be pulling files from the Windows system often, I want my script to unlock these files.

What is the terminal command to unlock "Locked" files on OSX?

Solution 1:

To unlock files you can use:

chflags -R nouchg /PATH/TO/DIRECTORY/WITH/LOCKED/FILES/

• chflags = change flags on files/folders such as "locked"
• -R = recursive or for everything and follow directories within the specified directory
• nouchg = means the file can be changed
• /PATH/ = of course is the path to the files you want to change. Something like: ~/Sites/mysite/directory/with/locked/files/ works as well.

Solution 2:

This is helpful if you want to search an entire directory and unlock all files.

In the terminal cd to the directory

This command finds and will print a list of them.

$ find . -flags uchg

This command unlocks them.

$ find . -flags uchg -exec chflags nouchg {} \;

You can use the first command to double check that all the files are unlocked after running the second command, voilà !