I recently had a problem after upgrading to a new Macbook Pro. Deleting files required me to enter my password every time.

The problem started after I had manually copied a few files across to the new Mac running OSX Mavericks. Only these copied files were affected by the problem. After some mucking around, I worked out what the issue was.

Here’s how I found out what was wrong along with the solution that worked for me:

First, right click on a file that’s affected by the problem and click the “Get Info” link. You’ll be presented with a pane with file information. At the very bottom, there’s a sharing and permissions section.

It should look like this. The important part we need to take notice here is that there’s two entries for ‘everyone’ one set to ‘Custom’ and one set to ‘Read Only’. The one set to ‘Custom’ is the problem.

While you’re here, make sure that ‘you’ in the permissions above have ‘Read & Write’ privileges.

If you want to see what’s going on behind the ‘Custom’ permission, you can head to terminal and run the following command:

[bash]#ls -le file.zip[/bash]

In this command your listing (ls) long results with access information (-li) of the file (file.zip)

You should get a result that looks like this:

[email protected] 1 Korske  staff  2927 17 May 17:53 file.zip 
0: group:everyone deny delete

How do I stop finder asking me for a password to delete files?

Here’s the solution for this password asking dilemma.

In terminal, head to the folder that’s affected, most likely your home folder and run the following command

[bash]chmod -R -a "group:everyone deny delete" . [/bash]

In this command, you’re changing access permissions (chmod) recursively (-R) removing (-a)  the ‘Custom’ permission (group:everyone deny delete) in the current folder (.)

You may get a few lines that look like this:

chmod: No ACL present 'file.png'
chmod: No ACL present 'file2.zip'
chmod: No ACL present 'file3.txt'

That’s fine, these are files that weren’t affected by the problem to start with.

I hope that this helps you solve the annoying little deleting issue in OSX.