elegant chaos

Occasionally I’ve had errors where Software Update refused to download something, telling me that I didn’t have permissions to save the updated file.

In previous systems I think these files went into the /tmp folder, but in Snow Leopard they don’t, and I’ve finally managed to work out where they do go - /Library/Updates.

On my machine, somehow, I’d ended up with a couple of folders inside this one which were owned by another user, and which didn’t have group write permission.

To fix the problem, I did the following in a terminal window:

• sudo chown -R :admin /Library/Updates

• sudo chmod -R a+rwx /Library/Updates

You need to replace with your actual user name. In fact, I suspect that it doesn't matter who owns the files as long as they belong to the admin group, so if you want to be a little bit more security conscious, you could probably do this:

• sudo chown -R :admin /Library/Updates

• sudo chmod -R g+rwx /Library/Updates