Denied file read access on file I own and have full r/w permissions on

Question

I received an email with a plain text attachment (named 'noname') via Gmail and downloaded it using Chrome from gmail.com. It's a recurring automated report. Everyday I get the file , download it, open it, read it, and enjoy my life. Some days like today I get the file, download it and TextEdit on OS X won't let me open it.

TextEdit reports "The document "noname.txt" could not be opened. You don't have permissions."

A Get Info in Finder shows permissions:

ram (Me) Read & Write
Staff Read only
Everyone Read only

From a terminal I can do whatever I want to it (read, write, rename...). An ls -l shows:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 ram staff

An ls -le shows the same (i.e, no ACLs shown).

What gives?

Answer 1

From debugging a different problem (which showed up as deny file-read-data in the Console, see the other answer), it seems that sandboxd prevents sandboxed applications from reading quarantined data, so I think you'd need to remove the attribute with: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/file (see for instance https://superuser.com/a/28394/46794). You'd need to prefix the command with sudo if the file didn't belong to your user, but according to your info it does.

The other user reported that using a non-sandboxed application fixed the problem, and this would confirm that sandboxing is at fault.

An aside: When ls reports extended attributes with @ next to the permission field, you don't need ls -le file, but instead ls -l@ file.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if this is the same problem I had, but every now and then TextEdit (and not any other application) started showing a dialog like this when I tried to open any file:

The document “test.txt” could not be opened. You don’t have permission.

To view or change permissions, select the item in the Finder and choose File > Get Info.

There were messages like this in system.log:

9/13/12 10:41:42.952 PM sandboxd[21081]: ([357]) TextEdit(357) deny file-read-data /Users/lauri/Desktop/test.txt
9/13/12 10:41:55.118 PM TextEdit[357]: NSFileVersion tried to tried to add a new generation and failed. Versioned file URL: file://localhost/Users/lauri/Notes/test.txt, contents URL: file://localhost/Users/lauri/Notes/test.txt.sb-de6477ff-BhVNrq, error: Error Domain=GSLibraryErrorDomain Code=1 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (GSLibraryErrorDomain error 1.)"
9/13/12 10:41:55.118 PM TextEdit[357]: NSDocument failed to preserve the old version of a document. Here's the error:
Error Domain=GSLibraryErrorDomain Code=1 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (GSLibraryErrorDomain error 1.)"
9/13/12 10:41:55.119 PM TextEdit[357]: <Document: 0x7f971d00a510>: An error occurred while attempting to preserve the backup file at file://localhost/Users/lauri/Notes/test.txt.sb-de6477ff-BhVNrq: Error Domain=GSLibraryErrorDomain Code=1 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (GSLibraryErrorDomain error 1.)"

I was able to open files normally after quitting and reopening TextEdit.

I haven't seen those dialogs after I replaced TextEdit with TextEditPlus, which is basically a non-sandboxed fork of TextEdit.

Answer 3

Quit, don't just close, but Quit TextEdit. When TextEdit starts again it will "remember" who you are.

When Text Edit has the Main Menu Cmd-Q or Main Menu / TextEdit / Quit or Right Click on the TaskEdit dock icon and choose Quit.