OS X 10.5 Group Administration

Yesterday I needed to adjust the permissions to my server directories so I could have a PHP script create some files. There used to be a built in utility for this in OS X 10.4 (Netinfo Manager) but that appears to be gone from 10.5. So after a great deal of Googling I found this post.



OS X 10.5 has added an LDAP based directory service. And with the new service, all the group and user information is stored in the /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/ directory. Type sudo bash to get a shell as the root user and cd into the directory. Once there you can cd into the groups directory. All the groups on this system are listed with a .plist extension. All the files are in the standard Mac XML configuration format. You can simply edit the file using vi and add the user following the format you see in the files.



In addition, there is a command line tool, dscl, which can also be used to browse these files and make edits to them.