Can't upgrade application on OS X even though permissions are granted

Question

I want to upgrade an application (Firefox), which was installed by another user (with admin rights). My account has admin rights too, the application info shows the groups 'admin' and 'everyone' both have read and write permissions, but I'm not permitted to perform the upgrade, or even copy the new application to the applications folder.

I've checked in terminal, and even set the ownership to myself, but this didn't help. The file info currently looks like this:

bash-3.2# ls -las | grep Firefox
  0 drwxrwxrwx@   3 root            admin     102 12 jun 00:26 Firefox.app

Now the @-sign indicates a certain flag is set, which I thought was the quarantine flag which gives a dialog when you open the file the first time after downloading it. I've already opened it though (with the account that installed the application), so this is not it. Details of this flag are as follows:

bash-3.2# xattr -l Firefox.app/
com.apple.FinderInfo:
00000000  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 FF FF FF FF 00 00  |................|
00000010  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000020

I know the password for the other account, so I could update there, but I want to be able to do this with my own account. What am I missing here?

Answer 1

what about a quick fix: Delete the App completely. If dragging to trash doesn't work try:

sudo rm -r /Applications/Firefox.app

Change the path accordingly. Reinstall Firefox after that. If the problem persists, come back here and post your findings, please.

edit: On my machine i have the same xattrs and i'm able to upgrade. But i installed FF myself. have you had a look inside the Firefox directory?

ls -l /Applications/Firefox.app/

Do the contents belong to you, too? Did you execute a recursive chown?

chown yourusername:admin /Applications/Firefox.app/