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My iMac 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 running Mac OS X 10.7.3 was acting slightly strangely (essentially only a feeling), so I decided to repair permissions to see if anything had gone awry. Up pops a prohibition to my repairing permissions, namely "insufficient privileges". The exact same prohibition when attempting to "Verify Disk".
So, as has been my wont, I rebooted, and that problem disappeared, thus allowing me to repair permissions (the only one being the persistent issue with ACL, needing repairing every time, which helpers in the forums have advised me to ignore).
By the bye, now it seems to be running 'snappier', especially in browser.

Query: What might have caused the prohibition of "insufficient privileges"? And is the situation one which might have more serious repercussions down the road?
(I find nothing illuminating in this regard in Pogue's Missing Manual.)

And now, of course, I must reset all of my widgets — a major downside to restarting.

Since the OS X Public Beta I was of the never reboot unless some problem has a gun to your head. But a year or so back Apple began recommending rebooting periodically, say once a week. Since then, every week, maybe ten days, or so, if an update/upgrade has not forced a reboot I will restart my Mac. If I neglect to do so, or more likely flat forget, I find the system will often give warning in the form of slowdowns, application (usually Safari) hangs, or other annoying but otherwise inexplicable behavior.

Personally I have always attributed this to the systems need to periodically flush and reorganize the virtual memory (not to be confused with the swap files that are only a part of virtual memory).

Thanks for the insight.

Ditto (artie's comment).

If that's all there is behind my plaint, it would raise yet another question:
With all the 'heftiness' (~ sophistication) of the hardware and software, why can't the system declutter itself via some sort of subroutine when such annoyances pop up?
I know that it does such to some extent already, but this sort of thing is a little disconcerting at first blush ... and must be downright freaky to new users (although I guess that if they migrated from a PC ~ Microsoft platform they're already used to such bad behavior).
And I can't recall Pogue's having made a similar recommendation.
The iMac user's manual also doesn't suggest anything of the sort, commenting only that "If you'll be away from your iMac for less than a few days, put it to sleep. ... If you won't be using you iMac for more than a few days, shut it down."

> [...] application (usually Safari) hangs, [....]

I wonder whether your Safari hangs have anything to do with anything other than Safari's being a very poorly behaved app.

It has invariably beach-balled on launch since v 5.1.0 (on my deuced Mac(hina), anyhow), and its Web Content component has crashed 10 times since I updated to v 5.1.5 about 5 hours ago. (Edit: That's one of the issues supposedly addressed by the update, as it was supposedly addressed by the v 5.1.4 update.)

Edit: And all that is completely without regard to how long it's been since I last restarted.

Unfortunately such a subroutine would almost inevitably have to shut down many, perhaps all, of the running tasks to "declutter" the memory. In other words force a virtual restart.


I suspect Safari's current sometimes ill behavior is the result of separating Safari into multiple independent tasks to prevent exploitation by malware. That requires a lot of communications, messaging, between the tasks which can easily become an extremely complex process subject to multiple possibilities for error. Basically the idea is sound, but it will take some time to sort out completely.

Thanks for the reassurance, but I'm not holding my breath.

You can hold your breath if you like, but you might try Firefox 11.

I keep updating my Safari — just did v 5.1.5 — but I never open it and never use it.

The suggestion is appreciated, but I've already got Firefox 11 on my deuced Mac(hina), and it just doesn't do it for me.

I prefer to put up with Safari; they'll get it right soon.

If I were going to use a Mozilla browser on the Mac it would be Camino, not Firefox. But I still prefer Safari and so far 5.1.5 had been stable.

Browser comparison would be a better place for discussion of browser likes/dislikes.