Whenever I try to delete a file in Finder I get "Finder wants to make changes. Type your password to allow this."

From what I can tell you've got some funky group permissions. Normally your user membership would belong to the staff group. It appears you have only one directory with an ACL associated with it also (Movies). Usually the other main directories in your home folder such as downloads, desktop, pictures, etc. would have ACLs too. I realize not everyone has their system configured the same, so without knowing more that's all I can tell.

The following command in Terminal should add your username into the staff group:

sudo dscl . -append /Groups/staff GroupMembership `whoami`

It also couldn't hurt to reset your password and ACLs by:

  1. (for 10.7+) Restart then hold R, which should boot into the recovery partition.

  2. (for 10.5+) Insert the OS X Installation DVD and reboot with the C key held down.

  3. Choose language and select "Terminal" from the Utilities menu, then type 'resetpassword' to open the password reset utility.

  4. Select your hard drive and your user account from the drop-down menu.

  5. Click the "Reset" button next to "Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs."

  6. Select "Restart" from the Apple menu and then see if the issue is gone.


If you still have trouble try the following:

id

then

dscl . -read /Groups/steve GroupMembership

then

ls -le@a

and post the results back here.


OS X asks for a password whenever you try to delete a file because your ~/.Trash folder belongs to the root user and has permissions drwx------ — noone but root can read, write or open this folder. Being in the same situation I tried the command shown below in Terminal and it helped:

sudo chown -R steve:staff ~/.Trash

Note that I've changed my username to yours in this example. Also note that sudo command will ask you for user password — it's OK.