thirdbIT

I recently needed to reinstall OS X on my laptop. Once I reinstalled, I my primary username (”max”) didn’t have the same UID that it had had on the prior install. This didn’t cause any problems until I wanted to browse my Time Machine backups while not as root.

Much to my chagrin, I wasn’t able to change ownership of the old backups of /Users/max with a simple chown -R. What was going on here?

Two things. Volumes configured for Time Machine use two mechanisms to keep users (including you too, root) from mucking around too much and making the backups un-useful.

(It’s actually fairly difficult to corrupt a Time Machine backup, due to its novel and clever use of hardlinks, described at some length in this excellent article by John Siracusa, which I actually mentioned in an earlier post. One of the great things about Time Machine is that the files are actually files, not wrapped in some gargantuan monolithic binary clump comprehensible only to a particular flavor of backup software.)

If you need to do major mucking, like I did, this is what you have to deal with:

• Filesystem ACLs, manipulated with fsaclctl. (Yeah, it’s a damn mouthful. Think “filesystem ACL control” and you’ll be somewhat OK.
• UFS+ extended filesystem attributes, manipulated with chflags

You might not need to do major mucking. You might want to do parts of this if, for example, you discover that Time Machine just backed up a bunch of Linux ISOs you really don’t want to waste your storage space backing up.

Naturally, you’ll need to be root or using sudo in order to actually change these.

First, you need to disable ACLs on the filesystem being managed by Time Machine. It’s easy. This doesn’t destroy any ACL metadata stored, it just stops (temporarily, if you wish) from being used or enforced.

fsaclctl -p /Volumes/backup_vol -d

where “backup_vol” is whatever the name of your Time Machine volume is.

Next, if you had the same situation as I did where you need to change ownership of a whole branch of your filesystem, you’ll want to use chflags, but probably selectively. Here’s what I did:

find /Volumes/backup_vol/Backups.backupdb/machinename/”Macintosh HD”/Users/max -flags +uchg -print0 | xargs -0 chflags -R nouchg

where machinename is the short hostname of the backed-up machine in question. “Macintosh HD” is the default main volume name, which may or may not be the case for you; don’t forget to enclose the name in quotes if it’s got spaces in it.

For those less Unix-inclined of you, that finds every file in my backed up /Users/max branch that has the “uchg” flag set (no user changes permitted) and unsets the flag. For my purposes, I don’t believe I need to reset the “uchg” flag back, so I didn’t store the changed filenames in order to do so.

Finally I changed the whole branch to belong to me again:

chown -Rh max /Volumes/backup_vol/Backups.backupdb/machinename/”Macintosh HD”/Users/max

There were a couple of symlinks that the above choked on, but they weren’t important enough to me to track down exactly why the ownership of the symlinks wasn’t changing. This may not, obviously, be the case every time. I could have programmatically found them, deleted them, and re-linked them, but it wasn’t worth the effort.

Don’t forget to turn the filesystem ACLs back on:

fsaclctl -p /Volumes/backup_vol -e

Yesterday I discovered, entirely by accident, that when you’ve got an Open File window in Textmate, hitting the forward slash / does precisely what you’d like it to do: drops down a box that allows you to type the path to the file to open, complete with tab completion, as in a command prompt.

I’m sure everyone in the world already knew this, but I’m still pretty new to Textmate, and even though I have the excellent Textmate book, there are only so many tips and shortcuts your brain can pick up at once.

It turns out that ordinary Finder windows also have a shortcut to get a path text entry box, but it’s not nearly as intuitive ( command-shift-G) as a simple /, and the tab completion is not as nice, because it tries to discourage you from getting into the guts of your computer. For example, in Textmate, if you type /u - tab, it gives you /usr; in the Finder, it tries to give you /Users . I understand that this makes sense for the average Finder user, but it’s still oddly disorienting.

Through the wonders of google, I just found out that there’s a way to make your Finder stop hiding root:

As you know, the Finder hides the standard Unix files and folders from you. You can “Go To Folder…” and type in the name of the folder such as /var/log, but that’s fiddly and you still don’t see the “dot” files, so for any serious session, it’s probably easier to drop into Terminal. Except, there’s a terminal command that will make all files and folders display in your Finder. defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true et voila

This works, I’ve tried it, but then I put it back the way it was because I decided I really didn’t want my dad mucking around in root while he’s checking his email. (Sorry, Dad.)

It’s easy to forget that the windowing system is just a windowing system — it’s not the OS. And that Finder is just an application. And that even the command prompt, which I am comfortable enough in (but not like Max, who is really one of the best commandline geeks I’ve ever known) is just a shell. Abstractions on top of abstractions, and all of them leaky…