What does 'Repair Permissions' mean anyway?

Repairing permissions is usually my first line of defense (after re-start) whenever things go a little screwy, but I really don't know what that means. What exactly is being repaired? And what's being "permitted"? Is it about corrupted files?
I'm just curious (and a little confused).
: )

Repairing permissions should not be the first line of defense if you have problems. In fact permissions should rarely ever require repairing and rarely solve any problem. Here's some good reading:
Repair Permissions- A false panacea
Repairing permissions- What you need to know
Take Control of Permissions in OS X.
If you want to keep your computer running smoothly, then read the following:
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.0 is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.2 is Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. The current version, 1.5.1, is Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.

Similar Messages

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    Here are some official explanations from the Apple Knowledge Base.
    The articles were written to apply to Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3, but they apply to 10.4 Tiger as well.
    Here's the short explanation:
    "About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature"
    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751
    Here's the excruciatingly in-depth explanation:
    "Troubleshooting permissions issues in Mac OS X"
    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106712

    How do preferences get wonked in the first place?
    In the previous thread on "symphony install problems"
    Allan Sharman, "symphony install problem", 06:04am Nov 8, 2005 CDT
    I tried to explain the problem in some detail. But here's a more concise explanation from Wikipedia:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repair_permissions
    "Repair permissions
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
    Repairing disk permissions is a troubleshooting activity commonly associated with Apple Computer's Mac OS X operating system.
    The Darwin [Unix] layer of OS X manages which users are able to access which files by maintaining a list of Unix permissions for each file. Over time this data can become corrupted or get changed as applications edit the permissions to allow necessary file access, then get terminated before reverting them. The result of this is that in extreme circumstances the operating system may not allow itself to access files that it needs. This has been reported by users to result in the wide variety of errors already mentioned. Because of this, repairing permissions has become a standard troubleshooting first step to combat unexpected behaviour encountered on Mac OS X. Reparing permissions has been reported to fix problems with booting the system, misbehaving applications, Finder functions, malformed icons, problems with software installations and other problems besides. Although the necessity of carrying this process out as a maintenance activity has been called into question, some users claim that the process should be run on a weekly basis to prevent errors developing."

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    I've seen a lot of comments in these forums that one should verify and repair permissions of the MacHD drive before installing an update such as 10.5.3.
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    Many thanks for any help. I like to think of myself as a 'reasonably' savvy user but am drawing blanks on this topic.
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    Hi
    See if this helps?
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    A week ago, I have used Disk Utility to check and repair permissions. Today, I had a crash and many permissions seemed to be corrupt (?) or wrong. So I have repaired them. When I repair my car properly, it is OK. But after repairing permissions on my machine, the following check has listed more problems than before.
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    HI,
    *"Should I buy a new machine? "*
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