What is the "wheel" user in macOS/OS X?
Problem
I recently reinstalled iTunes and I noticed something peculiar. The original version of iTunes has a user in the permissions known as that is set to "Read Only". I dragged this version of iTunes to the trash and installed a new copy, and when I look at the properties for iTunes it no longer says , but rather just . Here is a screenshot with the new version (left) and the old version (right): What is the user? How is it set (I can't seem to set it in the GUI)? Why would the permissions be different now? It's not a problem, I'm just terribly curious.
Error Output
wheel
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1 Fix
Fix for: What is the "wheel" user in macOS/OS X?
Some color: Mac OS X has roots in BSD UNIX, a.k.a. the UNIX that came out of UC Berkeley. They had a group of trusted people that could become superuser by using the command. So they coded their UNIX to only allow people in this specific group to become superuser using . They chose the groupname 'wheel', supposedly reference to other systems that had WHEEL, possibly a reference to being a 'big wheel' It's less important now that you have the GUI authorization popups and sudo. You can use sudo w…
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