Android Studio setup - Clear Read-Only Status

Question

Permission to write to certain folder isn't obtained. Android Studio asks this. Only thing I can click on "Cancel" button.

Afterwards, when I want to leave Android Studio I get "could not save project".

• Project is downloaded from git repository.
• Works fine on other macs.
• Project is downloaded to user/projects/project-name.
• Tried to play with permissions without success
• Tried to change project directory location (another project in the same directory is working)
• Installed all possible packages

Locked icons in Android studio.

I need any suggestion in what direction to look for solution?

Answer 1

The most likely explanation is that the directory and all its files are owned by a different user account on the system. Normally the "Clear Read-Only Access" dialog will fix up read permission problems if it's possible to do so; if it's not (because the files are owned by another user), the dialog will refuse to let you click the OK button.

You can confirm this by using the ls command from the MacOS terminal. Here's an example from a random project of mine.

sbarta-macbookpro2:~/AndroidStudioProjects/ASProject$ ls -alh total 80 -rw-r--r--  1 foo   eng   438B Jan  9 10:54 local.properties -rw-r--r--  1 foo   eng   853B Jan  9 10:54 gradle.properties drwxr-xr-x  3 foo   eng   102B Jan  9 10:54 gradle 

If you run man ls you can read the man page for the ls command and get a lot more information on the output from the command, but the single "w" character in the output for each file tells me that those files are only writable by the file's owner. Those files are all owned by the foo user (which is what the third column of output means). I'm not foo when I'm running Android Studio, so I can't write to those files, and since I'm not foo, I don't have permissions to give myself write access to them.

You can fix it with the following command. Be very careful you use the correct path when you run this command; making large-scale filesystem changes under sudo can do a lot of damage if you make a mistake.

sudo chown -R $USER /path/to/project/directory 

There's probably a way to fix this through the Finder UI, but the command-line is pretty easy.

It will ask you for an administrator password, and after that it should make you the owner of those files and the "Clear Read-Only Status" dialog should work for you.