TIL: fixing folder access from bash
I had a few scary moments the other day – I went to ls ~/Desktop and received a permission denied error!!!!
Ultimately, this wasn’t a “real” problem, just that my terminal program had lost permission to access that directory. But before I figured that out, I went down the rabbit hole of weird Apple file system attributes. (I always forget that the command is xattr and not chattr.)
Things got really confusing when I noticed that the com.apple.macl permission on ~/Desktop had a value of “-1”! And that wasn’t changeable from the terminal! Not even via sudo. Shades of selinux!
Eventually, the rabbit warren led me to a blog post, which quoted a hacker news article about a side effect of pasting a Finder link into a terminal window. Ta da! Copy/paste and the problem was solved. (Of course, I have no idea how the corruption happened, which is a different issue.)