What does it show for 'owner' in "Get Info"?

macmath · 09-02-2002, 10:50 PM

When I select a file in the Finder, and Get Info, one of the choices is "Ownership and Permissions". On my Mac at work, if the file is something I own, it will give my username, and then '(Me)'. ...kind of cute. On my Mac at home, if the file is something I own, rather than showing my username, it shows what looks like a Japanese character and then '(Me)'. Does anyone else have something like this? To see a picture of what it looks like (made in AppleWorks), go to http://homepage.mac.com/edthome).

This happened just after I upgraded (archive and clean install) to Jaguar. The shortname for this account is simply 'us' (for our family); perhaps that translates to this character? In addition, my password on the machine at home is, by chance, a Romanization of a Japanese word, but I would not think that it would hint at one's password [and I don't know what the character stands for].

macmath · 09-05-2002, 01:56 PM

I've taken a partial screen shot of the owner/privelege settings from the "Get Info" window of an arbitrary file in my home folder.

You'll now see also see this partial screenshot if you use the link
http://homepage.mac.com/edthome

[I had to do some readings at Mac OS X Hints to figure out how to take this shot. Thanks. You'll see in the picture that I unlocked the settings...I did this so that the entries would appear darker.]

Having that, instead of the short name listed as owner is perfect ok, I just find it interesting and wanted to know if anyone knew why or had anything similar.

macmath · 09-06-2002, 02:44 PM

I have found out from a friend (who is Japanese) that this is a Chinese character which means "negative" (as in the opposite of "affirmative") or "no" or "rejection".

I guess it is some kind of computer error (rather than an Easter Egg) and perhaps it will go away after I run DiskWarrior on my drive this weekend.

macmath · 09-07-2002, 02:56 PM

I have discovered:

1) My permissions for my account "us" are quite wrong. I have two accounts set up on a family machine used only by us. One is the account we use, called "us", and one is just an stock out-of-the-box account so that if something isn't working I can see if it is the system or something that resides only in the account "us". The permissions for the stock account are drwx------, with the group being 'wheel'. The permissions for 'us' are drwxr-xr-x, with the group being 'staff'.

2) When I log into the stock account, if I hold down on the owner tab in the Owner & Permissions pane of the Get-Info window for "us", both "us" and "www" are missing as possibilites. While logged in as "us", the same tab shows no "www" choice, and has the above-mentioned Chinese character (Me) instead of the "us" tab. By the way, BatchMod shows 'us' as the owner of the folder 'us', so it seems 'Get Info' might be the only entity that does not think there is an 'us'.

So, I am going to stop posting in this thread and soon post one in the 'Help Requests' portion of the Forums to see if I can get help correcting this. Sorry to take the space here to post about what appears to be my own anomalies.

macmath · 09-09-2002, 07:46 AM

As I mentioned, I posted a thread concerning this problem on the System Forum (http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...&threadid=5360)
and what I learned there is that the permissions for "us" were what they should be and the permissions for the stock account were bad. In the process of creating a new stock account, the problem with the Chinese character appearing in the above-mentioned tab, instead of "us", disappeared and all was as it should be. In the process of deleting the old stock account, the problem with the Chinese character returned. However, BatchMod and ls -l both show the owner of the home folder for "us" (and its contents) to be "us", as they should. So I am just going to assume that this is a bug with the Get Info window.

So I promise not to update this again

. I only updated it this time because I was incorrect about the permissions in the previous post.

vnavone · 09-23-2002, 11:36 PM

Hi MacMath, I'm experiencing the same problem you've described after having installed 10.2 clean. Have you found any resolution yet?

macmath · 09-24-2002, 12:40 AM

Hi. I am still experiencing the problem. At times it appears to be a different character, but if I click on the lock, it will almost always return to the character which I have linked to (at least after an additional click). When .mac arrives, the link will be broken.

I posted one post also in the Apple Discussions forum after the posts here (Discussions>Getting Started>General Use>Customization:Possible Bug in Get Info. One person there reports it happening to him as well. That person also got the problem to go away by creating another account; the problem also recurred for him after he deleted the account.

Do you see the same character, or a different one? Is there anything similar about your circumstance...for instance, (a) does your short name also fall alphabetically after 'unknown' in the 'owner' list?, (b) is your short name also a two letter word?, (c) is there also another account on the machine? I'm becoming rather foolish and grasping at straws. I'll post back if I find anything out.

vnavone · 09-24-2002, 01:53 AM

Thanks for the response. The asian character in the owner pulldown tends to change - I haven't noticed any pattern yet. My account short name ("victor") does fall alphabetically after "unknown", and there is one additional account on my Mac that I use for testing.

macmath · 02-02-2003, 12:03 PM

For whatever its worth, an update.

I backed-up my drive, reformatted with 2 partitions (for ease of short-term backups, and general repairs [updates of utilities, so that I don't have to pay $15 for another startup disk with the updated utility on it]) and reinstalled everything.

I used the same ownernames and shortnames because they still seemed reasonable, but this time 'us' was the first account created (rather than the second). The same problem still occurred. That is, with two accounts, the shortname showed up in the 'Get Info' window as an asian character, but once I added a 3rd account, the shortname showed up correctly in the 'Get Info' window as 'us'. So I am assuming this is a reproducible 'bug'. It seems to be cosmetic only, as 'ls -al' shows the correct shortname as the owner of everything

slur · 02-17-2003, 12:37 PM

Others have suggested that keeping an odd number of user accounts seems to prevent this issue. It might also be possible to work around it by changing the UIDs of your accounts, which can be done by strategically adding and removing accounts.

yellow · 02-17-2003, 12:43 PM

Greetings,

I posted this problem in January after fiddling with it for a month or so. I have contacted Apple and supposedly the Apple Engineers are working on this "problem". Apparently this has been plaguing people since Jaguar first came out but somehow Apple had never heard of it. Check out this other thread for more info:

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...&threadid=8337

Please note: Having an even number of users in your "Accounts" prefpane will cause this problem to manifest itself.

macmath · 04-03-2003, 10:06 AM

All of you who noticed this problem:

Does it seem to be fixed for you since OS X 10.2.4?

I just deleted a user and so far it shows the correct shortname with no asian characters.

macmath · 08-23-2003, 11:44 PM

I am posting this note at this thread as well, since it is about the same topic:

I have two partitions, each with OS X 10.2.6 installed. The one I use all the time has 4 users and has stopped displaying the asian character, as I mentioned above. It still does not show an asian character. The other partition has only had 1 user up until today.

Today, I added a user and now with 2 users, the asian character problem occurs. That is really odd...same computer, same version of the OS, and one partition displays the problem and the other does not!

yellow · 08-24-2003, 12:47 AM

This is a bug in the OS X system. If you have an even number of users it appears, an odd number and it's gone. Try this and you'll see it's gone. BTW, root being enabled has no effect on the even/off numebr.

See: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...ht=strangeness

macmath · 08-24-2003, 01:08 AM

Quote:


	Originally posted by yellow This is a bug in the OS X system. If you have an even number of users it appears, an odd number and it's gone. Try this and you'll see it's gone. BTW, root being enabled has no effect on the even/off numebr. See: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...ht=strangeness

I know. That is why I said that my situation was odd. Both partitions have an even number of users, yet when I boot from one, there are no asian characters appearing and when I boot from the other, there are asian characters appearing in the Owners' and Permissions tab.

Xiong Changnian · 06-12-2005, 06:19 AM

This is a truly bizarre bug. For a minute, I thought Apple was incredibly smart -- sort of -- and figured out that my long account name was in pinyin -- so tried to guess from the dozens of characters that might be my name. Well, that wasn't it. Adding a dummy account did solve the problem, and my thanks to this forum for presenting the workaround. I wonder if Apple will ever fix this, or just tell us to buy Tiger.

macmath · 06-12-2005, 10:49 AM

I was thinking that this bug existed in Jaguar only and was gone by Panther. What version of OS X are you running?

I saw this bug with Jaguar only, I think.

yellow · 06-12-2005, 11:18 AM

Yes, this bug was fixed in both Panther and Tiger, but it was never addressed in Jaguar. For the most part, it was benign. I only had it cause problems once.

09-02-2002, 10:50 PM	#1
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	What does it show for 'owner' in "Get Info"? When I select a file in the Finder, and Get Info, one of the choices is "Ownership and Permissions". On my Mac at work, if the file is something I own, it will give my username, and then '(Me)'. ...kind of cute. On my Mac at home, if the file is something I own, rather than showing my username, it shows what looks like a Japanese character and then '(Me)'. Does anyone else have something like this? To see a picture of what it looks like (made in AppleWorks), go to http://homepage.mac.com/edthome). This happened just after I upgraded (archive and clean install) to Jaguar. The shortname for this account is simply 'us' (for our family); perhaps that translates to this character? In addition, my password on the machine at home is, by chance, a Romanization of a Japanese word, but I would not think that it would hint at one's password [and I don't know what the character stands for]. Last edited by macmath; 09-03-2002 at 09:12 AM.

09-05-2002, 01:56 PM	#2
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	Screen shot of "Owner/Privelege" available I've taken a partial screen shot of the owner/privelege settings from the "Get Info" window of an arbitrary file in my home folder. You'll now see also see this partial screenshot if you use the link http://homepage.mac.com/edthome [I had to do some readings at Mac OS X Hints to figure out how to take this shot. Thanks. You'll see in the picture that I unlocked the settings...I did this so that the entries would appear darker.] Having that, instead of the short name listed as owner is perfect ok, I just find it interesting and wanted to know if anyone knew why or had anything similar. Last edited by macmath; 09-05-2002 at 02:07 PM.

09-06-2002, 02:44 PM	#3
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	The character means 'No'. I have found out from a friend (who is Japanese) that this is a Chinese character which means "negative" (as in the opposite of "affirmative") or "no" or "rejection". I guess it is some kind of computer error (rather than an Easter Egg) and perhaps it will go away after I run DiskWarrior on my drive this weekend.

09-23-2002, 11:36 PM	#6
vnavone Prospect Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Oakland, CA Posts: 16	Asian characters in ownership pulldown Hi MacMath, I'm experiencing the same problem you've described after having installed 10.2 clean. Have you found any resolution yet? __________________ Victor Navone 2-4D Artist

09-24-2002, 01:53 AM	#8
vnavone Prospect Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Oakland, CA Posts: 16	Thanks for the response. The asian character in the owner pulldown tends to change - I haven't noticed any pattern yet. My account short name ("victor") does fall alphabetically after "unknown", and there is one additional account on my Mac that I use for testing. __________________ Victor Navone 2-4D Artist

09-07-2002, 02:56 PM	#4
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	I have discovered: 1) My permissions for my account "us" are quite wrong. I have two accounts set up on a family machine used only by us. One is the account we use, called "us", and one is just an stock out-of-the-box account so that if something isn't working I can see if it is the system or something that resides only in the account "us". The permissions for the stock account are drwx------, with the group being 'wheel'. The permissions for 'us' are drwxr-xr-x, with the group being 'staff'. 2) When I log into the stock account, if I hold down on the owner tab in the Owner & Permissions pane of the Get-Info window for "us", both "us" and "www" are missing as possibilites. While logged in as "us", the same tab shows no "www" choice, and has the above-mentioned Chinese character (Me) instead of the "us" tab. By the way, BatchMod shows 'us' as the owner of the folder 'us', so it seems 'Get Info' might be the only entity that does not think there is an 'us'. So, I am going to stop posting in this thread and soon post one in the 'Help Requests' portion of the Forums to see if I can get help correcting this. Sorry to take the space here to post about what appears to be my own anomalies.

09-09-2002, 07:46 AM	#5
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	As I mentioned, I posted a thread concerning this problem on the System Forum (http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...&threadid=5360) and what I learned there is that the permissions for "us" were what they should be and the permissions for the stock account were bad. In the process of creating a new stock account, the problem with the Chinese character appearing in the above-mentioned tab, instead of "us", disappeared and all was as it should be. In the process of deleting the old stock account, the problem with the Chinese character returned. However, BatchMod and ls -l both show the owner of the home folder for "us" (and its contents) to be "us", as they should. So I am just going to assume that this is a bug with the Get Info window. So I promise not to update this again . I only updated it this time because I was incorrect about the permissions in the previous post.

09-24-2002, 12:40 AM	#7
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	Hi. I am still experiencing the problem. At times it appears to be a different character, but if I click on the lock, it will almost always return to the character which I have linked to (at least after an additional click). When .mac arrives, the link will be broken. I posted one post also in the Apple Discussions forum after the posts here (Discussions>Getting Started>General Use>Customization:Possible Bug in Get Info. One person there reports it happening to him as well. That person also got the problem to go away by creating another account; the problem also recurred for him after he deleted the account. Do you see the same character, or a different one? Is there anything similar about your circumstance...for instance, (a) does your short name also fall alphabetically after 'unknown' in the 'owner' list?, (b) is your short name also a two letter word?, (c) is there also another account on the machine? I'm becoming rather foolish and grasping at straws. I'll post back if I find anything out.

02-02-2003, 12:03 PM	#9
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	For whatever its worth, an update. I backed-up my drive, reformatted with 2 partitions (for ease of short-term backups, and general repairs [updates of utilities, so that I don't have to pay $15 for another startup disk with the updated utility on it]) and reinstalled everything. I used the same ownernames and shortnames because they still seemed reasonable, but this time 'us' was the first account created (rather than the second). The same problem still occurred. That is, with two accounts, the shortname showed up in the 'Get Info' window as an asian character, but once I added a 3rd account, the shortname showed up correctly in the 'Get Info' window as 'us'. So I am assuming this is a reproducible 'bug'. It seems to be cosmetic only, as 'ls -al' shows the correct shortname as the owner of everything

02-17-2003, 12:37 PM	#10
slur Prospect Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Portland, OR Posts: 17	how odd ... or is it even? Others have suggested that keeping an odd number of user accounts seems to prevent this issue. It might also be possible to work around it by changing the UIDs of your accounts, which can be done by strategically adding and removing accounts. __________________ \| \| slur was here \|

02-17-2003, 12:43 PM	#11
yellow Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 10,677	Apple has been notified Greetings, I posted this problem in January after fiddling with it for a month or so. I have contacted Apple and supposedly the Apple Engineers are working on this "problem". Apparently this has been plaguing people since Jaguar first came out but somehow Apple had never heard of it. Check out this other thread for more info: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...&threadid=8337 Please note: Having an even number of users in your "Accounts" prefpane will cause this problem to manifest itself.

04-03-2003, 10:06 AM	#12
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	All of you who noticed this problem: Does it seem to be fixed for you since OS X 10.2.4? I just deleted a user and so far it shows the correct shortname with no asian characters.

08-23-2003, 11:44 PM	#13
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	additional oddity I am posting this note at this thread as well, since it is about the same topic: I have two partitions, each with OS X 10.2.6 installed. The one I use all the time has 4 users and has stopped displaying the asian character, as I mentioned above. It still does not show an asian character. The other partition has only had 1 user up until today. Today, I added a user and now with 2 users, the asian character problem occurs. That is really odd...same computer, same version of the OS, and one partition displays the problem and the other does not!

08-24-2003, 12:47 AM	#14
yellow Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 10,677	This is a bug in the OS X system. If you have an even number of users it appears, an odd number and it's gone. Try this and you'll see it's gone. BTW, root being enabled has no effect on the even/off numebr. See: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showth...ht=strangeness

06-12-2005, 06:19 AM	#16
Xiong Changnian Registered User Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 1	"Chinese" short account name in Get Info This is a truly bizarre bug. For a minute, I thought Apple was incredibly smart -- sort of -- and figured out that my long account name was in pinyin -- so tried to guess from the dozens of characters that might be my name. Well, that wasn't it. Adding a dummy account did solve the problem, and my thanks to this forum for presenting the workaround. I wonder if Apple will ever fix this, or just tell us to buy Tiger.

06-12-2005, 10:49 AM	#17
macmath MVP Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Elsewhere Posts: 1,497	I was thinking that this bug existed in Jaguar only and was gone by Panther. What version of OS X are you running? I saw this bug with Jaguar only, I think.

06-12-2005, 11:18 AM	#18
yellow Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 10,677	Yes, this bug was fixed in both Panther and Tiger, but it was never addressed in Jaguar. For the most part, it was benign. I only had it cause problems once.