The document "x" could not be saved. You don’t have permission

Question

I am getting the following error:

The document could not be saved. You don't have permission

The error is not helpful at all because it does not point to where I don't have permission. To save the file, I need to Duplicate it each time, which is very painful. This time the error is from CleanWriterPro, but I have also received it from Numbers and TextEdit. Saving with TextMate works fine.

Permissions to the file are set up correctly according to Finder.

I think this must be some kind of problem with AutoSave permissions but despite googling with the error, I have not yet figured out what's wrong.

I found one possible culprit for this problem for me:

grant:Library joneskoo $ pwd
/Users/joneskoo/Library
grant:Library joneskoo $ ls -lad Autosave\ Information/
drwx------  2 root  staff  68 Sep 25  2010 Autosave Information/

Since Library is hidden in Lion, it needs to be made visible before the permissions can be fixed in Finder:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

After unhiding the Library, I opened the Get Information for Library, clicked the lock and selected "Apply to enclosing items" so that all files in Library made owned by me and no permissions for others.

However, CleanWriterPro is still not able to save the file in Documents, even though I repeated the step for Documents and Desktop. I could not reproduce the problem in Numbers now.

Repairing Disk permissions did not help.

Possibly related: I can't even rename files in Finder now under Documents without typing my password. Techrepublic: Introduction to OS X access control lists.

grant:~ joneskoo $ ls -led Documents/
drwxr-xr-x+ 44 joneskoo  staff  1496 Jan 17 06:55 Documents/
 0: group:everyone deny delete

I don't know what introduced that ACL, Finder? How can I remove it?

The question is: what are all the places I need to check to fix this problem?

Answer 1

I was able to fix the problem for CleanWriterPro by removing extended ACL from the affected directories (Documents, Desktop):

$ chmod -R -N Desktop Documents

For others with the same problem, I'd suggest checking the permissions of at least the following places:

• ~/Library/Autosave Information
• ~/Library/Containers – see Unsaved Files in OS X Lion
• the folders containing the problematic files

Use the command

$ ls -le Documents

to show also the extended ACLs when looking at the problem. Finder will not show all ACL information.

There is a related discussion at Apple Discussion Forums, Lion Permissions Problem. It proposes the solution of removing all ACL from home directory and restoring the ACLs for some default folders. Please read the entire post from there; but the commands are:

chmod -R -N ~
chmod +a "everyone deny delete" ~/ ~/Desktop ~/Documents ~/Downloads ~/Library ~/Movies ~/Music ~/Pictures ~/Public

The ACL prevents the user from deleting or renaming the default folders.

An unintuitive but maybe safer(?) alternative is described at OS X Daily: Repair user permissions in Mac OS X Lion

Answer 2

I have encountered this problem twice for TextEdit, on OS X Lion, and rebooting the computer fixed the problem both times.

Sorry that I can't give you anything more profound, but there you go.

Answer 3

Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again? (I.e. restarting the offending program.)

It worked just now for a friend of mine. I asked him to do it while I was here researching -- and it worked.

YMMV, of course.

Answer 4

I know this is an old thread, but it comes up high in the google search results, so I'm adding my answer for OSX 10.14. I was having this issue in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

I went to security in System Preferences, selected the privacy "tab," and then in the left column scrolled down to "Full Disk Permission." I'm guessing this is not something you normally want to do, but by giving those three apps permission, it now works.

To add the apps, first unlock the interface with the lock icon. Then, assuming you've already selected "Full Disk Access," click the plus button under the right column's list of apps. Go to /Applications and select the first app. Repeat for the other two.

Edit: I found a different set of instructions for how to fix this, so I went back to delete the apps from the "Full Disk Access" list. However, the problem no longer occurred. Somehow just adding the apps to this list, saving a file (not sure if this step was important), and then removing them from the "Full Disk Access" list fixed the problem.

Answer 5

First, I'd recommend looking at the permissions on the folder containing the file in question.

Second, a tool that might help you is the Repair Permissions function in Disk Utility. This might find and repair what is wrong with your system.

Answer 6

To remove any ACLs and restore all the files in your home directory to be owned by you, you can run the following commands in Terminal:

 sudo chown -R `whoami` ~
 chmod -N -R ~

This should ensure you have access to all your files. Some ACLs are in place by default, however, to prevent you from deleting your Documents folder, Music folder, etc., and to enable other users to access your Public folder. While all these folders were able to serve their function in versions of OS X that predate ACLs, removing the ACLs should fix the access problems you are encountering, but might make your Public folder behave differently than expected.

Answer 7

To make one of the possible issues clear, under Lion the Disk Utility does not repair user home directory file permissions. The process linked at the end of the first answer -- Repair user permissions in Mac OS X Lion is a simple and direct way to reset user permissions.