What happens during permissions repair in OS X?
One of the commonly recommended maintenance routines in OS X for tackling system slowdowns and other performance problems or odd behavior is to run a "permissions fix" on the boot drive. This is done with Disk Utility, and because it will not hurt the system to perform it is often one of the first suggestions people offer for troubled systems.
Permissions in OS X are file and folder attributes that grant a specific user or group access rights to that file or folder. There are two types of permissions in OS X, the first being traditional UNIX permissions, … Read more