This is on MacOS Catalina, but the same behavior has been observed in prior versions of MacOS.
Similar questions have been asked for other default directories in the default home directory, but this is different. I am able to delete most of the other directories: ~/Music
, ~/Public
, and ~/Movies
all went away after I removed any ACL's from them. But ~/Pictures
is different, and no matter what I do, MacOS refuses to delete it.
bash-5.0# /bin/ls -led Pictures
drwxrwxr-x 2 MyLogin MyGroup 64 Nov 5 18:17 Pictures
bash-5.0# /bin/ls -lea Pictures
total 0
drwxrwxr-x 2 MyLogin MyGroup 64 Nov 5 18:17 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 72 MyLogin MyGroup 2304 Nov 5 18:17 ..
0: group:everyone deny delete
Note that the last ACL is applied to the parent directory of ~/Pictures
ie. my home directory, and that is not the cause of this behavior as I am able to delete other subdirectories without trouble.
This also does not appear to be a restriction imposed by System Integrity Protection:
bash-5.0# /bin/ls -leOd /usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x 1014 root wheel restricted 32448 Oct 23 01:19 /usr/bin
bash-5.0# /bin/ls -leOd Pictures/
drwxrwxr-x 2 MyLogin MyGroup - 64 Nov 5 18:23 Pictures/
bash-5.0# /bin/ls -leOa Pictures/
total 0
drwxrwxr-x 2 MyLogin MyGroup - 64 Nov 5 18:23 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 72 MyLogin MyGroup - 2304 Nov 5 18:23 ..
0: group:everyone deny delete
Note the restricted
attribute on /usr/bin
which is protected by SIP. ~/Pictures
has no such attribute.
I've tried as root, as my normal user account, and even as a different user after setting the permission 777. Nothing works.
My question is: what is protecting ~/Pictures
from deletion, and how can I turn it off?