Mac OS X: remove write-protect flag from file in Terminal

Posted by Albert on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Albert
Published on 2010-04-04T00:11:15Z Indexed on 2010/04/05 5:03 UTC
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Hi,

I have a file on a FAT32 volume which is shown as write-protected in Finder (so I cannot move it). Removing that write-protected flag in the information dialog works just fine.

However, I have many more such files and I thus want to do it via Terminal.

I already tried via 'chmod +w' but that didn't worked. 'ls -la' showed me that they are already just fine ("-rwxrwxrwx 1 az az " where az is my user account).

Then I thought this might be stored in some xattr properties but 'xattr -l' didn't gave me any entry.

Then I thought this might be some ACL setting (whereby I thought they would be stored as xattr but let's try it anyway) - and some Google search returned me something with 'chmod -a' or 'chmod -i' or so. All these tries only give me

chmod: No ACL currently associated with file"

or

chmod: Failed to set ACL on file...: Operation not permitted".

But I definitly have no write access to the file because I cannot move it or do any other change to it (in Terminal). Removing the write-access flag in Finder solves that.

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