Tonight I worked some more with my photo collection on my Mac. I transferred the files from a Windows box. After the transfer I ran into an interesting problem; I couldn't remove some of the files from my Mac using the "rm" command. Rm refused with a message of something like the following:
$ rm file-a
override rw-r--r-- kindred/staff uchg for file-a? y
rm: file-a: Operation not permitted
$
Had I been using the GUI Finder, it would have told me the file was locked. I wasn't using the Finder though, so I found the following article with Google... From there I was able to "man chflags" to see what I needed to do to remove the file.
$ chflags nouchg file-a
$ rm file-a
$
"ls -l" doesn't show the flags. To see them you need to use "ls -lO".
$ ls -lO
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 kindred staff uchg 0 Jun 29 23:21 file-b
-rw-r--r-- 1 kindred staff - 0 Jun 29 23:21 file-c
$
Above we see that file-b has the uchg flag set while file-c does not.
Like I said, had I been using Finder it would have asked me if I wanted to remove the locked file and let me do so. Finder also shows a little lock symbol with each locked file.
