If you create a brand new admin account in Lion, the following will be your id and group memberships (from $ id [new Lion account] | perl -lne 's/ /\n/g; s/,/\n\t/g; print;'
):
uid=504(lt)
gid=20(staff)
groups=20(staff)
402(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1)
12(everyone)
33(_appstore)
61(localaccounts)
79(_appserverusr)
80(admin)
81(_appserveradm)
98(_lpadmin)
100(_lpoperator)
204(_developer)
403(com.apple.sharepoint.group.2)
401(com.apple.access_screensharing)
In contrast, an older OS X account will have these uid, gid, etc:
uid=501(andrew)
gid=501(andrew)
groups=501(andrew)
403(com.apple.sharepoint.group.2)
204(_developer)
100(_lpoperator)
98(_lpadmin)
81(_appserveradm)
80(admin)
79(_appserverusr)
61(localaccounts)
12(everyone)
401(com.apple.access_screensharing)
402(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1)
Note that the gid=20(staff)
on the newer account and the that user is a member of 20(staff)
.
When you upgrade an older account to Lion, the older user and group names are kept.
There have been issues reported with not having staff
group membership on upgraded accounts:
- Inability to install or upgrade Homebrew;
- The display of 'Fetching' when pressing Cmd+I on files in your user folder
- ACL and permission issues.
The current workaround seems to be this:
- Add the user to staff (i.e.: $ sudo dscl . append /Groups/staff GroupMembership `whoami` or equivalent)
- Use Lion Recovery to restore default home folder permissions (Click on the 'No Disc – Lion' tab).
So far, this has fixed a lot of the issues I had with the upgrade, and I seem to have longer battery life and lower CPU usage.
However, here are the questions I have:
1. Should I go through the trouble of changing the gid=501
to gid=20
on my account or is just being a member of the group staff good enough?
2. Is being a member of 20(staff) the same as having gid=20(staff)?
3. If I did change the gid=
part of my account, how do I do that on Lion? I only know how to do it on Ubuntu...