Repairing Privileges

Question

Recently, when trying to access my Activity Monitor, it would not open. I checked the console which had the message: "Activity Monitor[1946]: The tool is not setuid root - please repair the privileges."
I've run the Disk Utility several times with no luck. Can someone tell me what "setuid root" means and how can I get back the use of the Activity Monitor?
Thanks.
Mac G5   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

Have you moved or renamed the Activity Monitor application? Also, have you removed any files from "/Library/Receipts"?
Open up the Terminal application in your Utilities folder and type each of these commands, followed by the "return" key:
lsbom -p MUGsTf /Library/Receipts/AdditionalEssentials.pkg/Contents/Archive.bom | grep pmTooland then
ls -l /Applications/Utilities/Activity\ Monitor.app/Contents/Resources/pmToolYou should get this for the first one:
-rwsrwxr-x root admin 54048 Sun Aug 21 21:52:07 2005 ./Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/Resources/pmTooland this for the second:
-rwsrwxr-x 1 root admin 54048 Aug 21 21:52 /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app/Contents/Resources/pmToolThe important thing is that you should get a result for the first one. If you don't, that's why Disk Utility isn't fixing its permissions. They should also match. In other words, if you get different permissions for the second one, that's your problem.
If you simply can't get the permissions fixed using Disk Utility, try in the Terminal:
sudo diskutil repairPermissions /Don't be alarmed if you get a bunch of output, but do look and see if Activity Monitor's permissions got changed.
Finally, if that doesn't work, you can try these two commands in the terminal:sudo chown root:admin /Applications/Utilities/Activity\ Monitor.app/Contents/Resources/pmTooland
sudo chmod 104775 /Applications/Utilities/Activity\ Monitor.app/Contents/Resources/pmToolJust as s disclaimer, though, I didn't try the last two on Activity Monitor, but I did try them on a junk file, and got the correct user:group and permissions.
As for "setuid root", basically, in the case of Activity Montior, there's a GUI component and then this pmTool. Because of the things pmTool does, it has to run as root, so it's a "setuid root" program. When it launches, it's launched as the user (you), but then gets root privileges.
If you could run Activity Monitor, you could see this in action. If you tell it to list all processes hierarchically, you'd see the Activiy Monitor running with your shoru user name, then below it, usually with a process ID 1 greater than Activity Monitor's PID, and with a user of "root", you'd see pmTool. It was launced from Activity Monitor, but since it's "setuid root", it becomes owned by root after it launches...
Clear as mud?
charlie