Frontier as Root

[Brian Ablaza]

I have people uploading folders of files to an OS X server. Frontier 
runs a thread that loops over the folders and nomalizes the file 
names.

When I was debugging this process, I would upload a folder and 
everything would run fast and smooth. But when other users do it, the 
scripts run, but so slowly that is is unusable.

The problem turns out to be file ownership. Since these people are 
users on the server, they are the owners of the files and folders. If 
I change the owner and the privileges to match mine, everything works 
as expected. In fact, I can't even run the scripts manually - I get a 
permissions violation at the point that Frontier tries to rename the 
files.

Frontier is running with my privileges, since it launches under my 
login. So I see 2 options:

1) Check the owners of files and folders and change them using 
Frontier's ability to run terminal commands. This would be a 
performance hit and add unwanted complexity.

2) Run Frontier as Root. Yes, yes, I know it's bad bad bad. 
But...would it solve my problem? And how would I do it?

Another thought: Is it possible to increase Frontier's privileges so 
that it can change these files *without* running as root?
-- 
Brian Ablaza
Chief Technology Officer
Star Interactive

856.488.2015