What are the correct access rights for the com.apple.dock.plist file on OS X?

Question

After having some problems removing items from the dock on OS X (Mountain Lion) today, I found out that if I reset the access rights on a particular file to give everyone all rights, it worked.

This is the command I used:

sudo chmod 777 ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

However, I don't particularly like those rights.

When I executed this command before changing to everything:

ls -la ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

It said:

-rw-------

Can anyone tell me what the correct access rights should be?

Answer 1

The default/correct permission should be as follow

-rw-------   1 <username>  staff   4.3K Jan 15 09:42 com.apple.dock.plist

If the user is john, the full path will be

Users/john/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

The default permission should be as follow

-rw-------   1 john  staff   4.3K Jan 15 09:42 com.apple.dock.plist

Common cause of the permission become wrong is when the user folder is moved/migrated from another OS X box or home folder being assigned to another account due to various reason.

To fix it, instead of changing permission, assign it to the correct user

chown <username> com.apple.dock.plist

If you want to reset ownership for the whole user directory

cd /Users
chown -R john john

The first john is username, the second john is directory name.