How do I get a game to work in more than just my account?

Question

I bought a game for my son at the weekend, which I installed successfully and it works fine in my account. But despite having it selected in Parental Controls, it won't work in his account. I tried removing all controls for him, but it still didn't work. The icon for the program looks like the general Apple icon, with ruler, brush, and pencil, and when you click on it a message appears saying "You cannot open the application because it may be damaged or incomplete". Well this isn't true, because it works in my account.
I tried searching for info about the error message on the Internet, and found advice on dealing with the message when it appeared with a completely different program. It advised right-clicking on the icon, and clicking on Show Package Contents, then Contents>Mac OS. Then it said double click on the icon (which opens Terminal) in there and next time it should run OK. This didn't work, but I noticed that there was not as much text in the Terminal window in my son's account as in mine, so I wonder if I need to enter the same text for him. This is all getting rather complicated, but does anybody know anything about Terminal, and whether any of this makes sense? Or is there something else I need to do?

Answer 1

Sphinx,
The folder that you copied should already contain any saved games, and they must remain where they are, relative to the game itself.
If you would like the copy to go back into the Applications folder, go right ahead and put it there, replacing the original. As long as you are just moving it, not making a copy, ownership will be retained by your son.
Kiraly has posted a command for use in Terminal. The command he has given does nothing for ownership, but rather changes permissions such that anyone will be able to run the game. The problem with this is that any new saved games will revert to the default permissions, and you will again encounter errors.
It is far better, in my opinion, to manage ownerhip in this case, not permissions.
OK, let's get started. The command to change ownership of any item is rather simple:
<pre style="overflow:auto; font-family: 'Monaco'; font-size: 10px">chown <who> <what></pre>
the "who" part will refer to a user by short name, and the "what" part will be the path to a file or folder. So far, we have three elements included in our command, and each one is separated by a space. The problem with this is that we can only modify items that we own; only "root" can modify items regardless of ownership. So, we are more often required to "become root" in order to execute this command:
<pre style="overflow:auto; font-family: 'Monaco'; font-size: 10px">sudo chown <who> <what></pre>
By preceeding our command with "sudo," we tell the command to execute as the "root user." Only admin users are allowed to perform this action, so we will be asked for our admin password. Once we have typed the command correctly, we press <RETURN>. We will receive a password prompt. We then type our password (it will not be echoed) and again press <RETURN> to execute the command.
This works fine for single files, but we will usually be dealing with more than a single item. Your case is a good example; one where ownership of an entire directory structure, including any "nested" files and folders, must be changed. For this, we need to add an "option" to the command: the "-R" option. This tells the command to change the ownership of the item named in the "path," and then to do the same "recursively" to every file and/or folder nested inside. It also implies that the target is a directory:
<pre style="overflow:auto; font-family: 'Monaco'; font-size: 10px">sudo chown -R <who> <what></pre>
Let's now talk about the two remaining variables, the "arguments" to the command.... The first argument (the "who" part) requires a bit of discussion. In simple terms, this will be a user's short name. However, it will most often also be necessary to change the "group ownership" when we change ownership. There is a separate command to accomplish this, but we can easily forego the need to use this second command by including it in this one. The tool we must use to do this is the ":" modifier, inlcuded in our "who" argument. In 10.3 and later, all users are members of their own, unique group, so we simply use their short name (which is also their group) twice:
<pre style="overflow:auto; font-family: 'Monaco'; font-size: 10px">sudo chown -R <who:who> <what></pre>
Now for the final part, the "what" argument... As stated earlier, this will be the path to the intended target (for example, /Users/HOME/Documents/My_Folder). Here, we must discuss the possibility that a path name will include spaces. We can name directories in OS X using spaces, but UNIX needs a little help with them. Since UNIX will normally see any space as an indication that another element to the command is coming, we must explicitly tell it that such is not the case. In other words, we must "escape" the space. We do this by using the forward slash before our space: "\" Let us assume that we have a folder named "My Folder" for which we want to change ownership. Our command will look something like this:
<pre style="overflow:auto; font-family: 'Monaco'; font-size: 10px">sudo chown -R fred:fred /Users/fred/Documents/My\ Folder</pre>
Obviously, the above command also assumes that we are logged in as "fred," and we are giving ourselves ownership of a folder in "fred's" HOME folder.
If this path naming convention is daunting to you, or you simply aren't sure of the correct path, the process can be automated somewhat. Any item can be dragged from the Finder into the Terminal window, and Terminal will automatically fill in the correct path. In this case, we would type the first part of our command:
<pre style="overflow:auto; font-family: 'Monaco'; font-size: 10px">sudo chown -R fred:fred</pre>
Next, we would type a trailing space, and then we would drag our folder from the Finder into the Terminal window. Finally, we would press <RETURN>, enter our admin password, then press <RETURN> again to execute.
Scott