For years when faced with any OS X problem the cry from the Mac Hatter has been Verify! Repair! Dodgy permissions were the root cause of all Mac ills, he told us with a great deal of conviction. Now, it seems, the tea party is over as El Capitan has deemed permission verifying and repairing to be an unnecessary frippery. Has all this hocus-pocus had us all fixated over the years on something that was merely a placebo rather than a general help.
Truth be told, El C is so new that I hadn’t had occasion to run the verify permissions routine. I hadn’t even noticed its absence in Disk Utility. I am a tad devastated because there was indeed something therapeutic in watching Disk Utility go through its routine of identifying file-access inconsistencies and then setting them right. But was it all necessary? Probably not, after all.
Now I am forewarned (see link below) I am wondering just why we have been told to repair permissions as a means of sorting out virtually any problem on a Mac. With hindsight it all seems to have been a bit of an old wives’ tale: A verification a month keeps the wicked witch at bay.
Of course, unbeknown to us, the authors of El Capitan could have introduced an automatic housekeeping routine to take care of permissions hiccups. Who knows?
If you do feel short changed at not being able to check and repair permissions in El Capitan, and remain convinced it’s a useful tonic, read these instructions on how to do it from the command prompt.