Mac asking for password for some files when deleting [duplicate]

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

This might likely be a permission issue. Maybe you can check some files in your folder for permission using the terminal.

Simply navigate into your target folder and type ls -l

Then take a look at the left column:

The leading d tells you if it is a directory. Then you have 3 chunks consisting of 3 letters each. The first chunk is for the user, the second for group and the rest for other. And r = read, w = write, x = execute.

Something like rwx-xr-x would mean that user has all rights, group can only read and execute (not write), and other can only execute.

To be on the save side, you could set everything in this folder to rwxrwxrwx by typing chmod ugo+rwx * -R into the terminal. u for user, g for group, and o for other. And via the + you'll give all three of them all permissions. The asterisk is the wild card that stands for everything that is in this folder, and the -R (recursive) makes sure, that you also cover the subfolders.