Home directory is read only

Question

Hi -
I'm having a strange problem with my home directory on my MacBook Pro that is running Leopard.
The finder window for my home directory claims it is read only (the pencil with a line through it shows up). However, if I do a Get Info on it, it says I have read/write permissions. All the directories inside my home directory are fine. If I go into terminal and change the permissions, I still can't write to it:
Tims-MacBookPro:Users Tim$ ls -l
total 0
drwxrwxrwt 4 root wheel 136 Sep 15 2008 Shared
drwxrwx---+ 46 Tim Tim 1564 Jul 4 16:26 Tim
Tims-MacBookPro:Users Tim$
Tims-MacBookPro:Users Tim$ cd Tim
Tims-MacBookPro:~ Tim$ mkdir test
mkdir: test: Permission denied
Tims-MacBookPro:~ Tim$
From the snippet above, clearly I have r/w access, yet I can't create a directory!
Any ideas what could be wrong?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Actually you do not have read/write access. Your Home folder is owned by the system user and the group is wheel. The correct values for a Home folder are:
Owner=you with r/w privileges
Group=staff with r/w or read-only privileges
Everyone=read-only privileges
Try this:
you can reset the ACLs on your home folder by the following series of terminal commands. It's up to you if you want to do that. I personally like them but I hate the way the ACLs are implemented in leopard so that many ACLs are invisible from GUI and yet can be propagated by using "apply to enclosed items" button. That's a major No-No in my book.
Here are the commands (in bold). just copy and paste the commands (they are in bold).
*chmod -R -N ~*
this removes all ACLs from files in the home directory.
The following two commands put the necessary ACLs back where they belong.
*chmod +a "everyone deny delete" ~/ ~/Desktop ~/Documents ~/Downloads ~/Library ~/Movies ~/Music ~/Pictures ~/Public ~/Sites*
*chmod +a "`id -un` allow list,addfile,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr, writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directoryinherit" ~/Public/Drop\ Box*
The above was provided by user V.K. in this forum discussion.