FG

Why does chown report "Operation not permitted" on OS X?

Fresh3 days ago
Mar 15, 2026196848 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

I am trying to do the following on my Mac (10.6.7): but Unix/Mac is returning "Operation not permitted". When I the culprit file, it looks as follows: I've tried and ; nothing works. Any ideas what's up? I'm trying to files I've copied from my old Ubuntu box. Most of the files have successfully 'ed recursively; just this one is stuck and I don't understand why.

Error Output

sudo chown myusername:wheel ./entries

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1 Fix

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Fix for: Why does chown report "Operation not permitted" on OS X?

Low Risk

Yes, Mac has many enhancements to Unix in the area of files. Ignoring the whole resource fork thing which is not used much anymore, there are: the standard Unix permissions and so on. Normal Unix tools apply. ACL's, viewable with and changeable with . file flags viewable with (Capital oh, not zero) and changeable with . extended attributes, viewable with (attribute keys only) and viewable and changeable with . (Use for help if does not give you anything.) Starting with OS X 10.11 "El Capitan", …

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Environment