I upgraded to El Capitan yesterday and everything was good until recently when I noticed I can't write anything (with sudo ofc) on /usr/bin as I tried to install phpbrew.
What could be causing this and how to troubleshoot it?
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OS X El Capitan is rootless. The feature can be disabled from the recovery partition. – fd0 Jun 26 '15 at 10:13
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Since OSX 10.11, Apple reinforced the security system. Called System Integrity Protection, Apple locks down:
/System
/sbin
/usr (with the exception of /usr/local subdirectory)
To disable this security feature you have to reboot your computer and hold CMD+R at start to boot into OS X Recovery Mode.
Then OS X Utilities > Terminal
Type the command csrutil disable; reboot
Your computer will restart. You will see a confirmation message about the desactivation.
To verified the status of CRS type csrutil status
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1I disabled and it still doesn't allow me to do anything:
/Users/Rob$ csrutil status System Integrity Protection status: disabled. /Users/Rob$ touch /usr/bin/yes touch: /usr/bin/yes: Permission denied– Roberto Sep 7 '17 at 6:18 -
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In most cases, it's better to install local customizations into /usr/local (e.g. /usr/local/bin rather than /bin or /usr/bin). That's what it's for, and this has been the case for a long time. If possible, I'd recommend following this best practice rather than disabling SIP. If you really do need to make changes in a restricted location, it's best to disable SIP, make the change, and then immediately re-enable SIP with
csrutil enable(in Recovery mode). – Gordon Davisson Feb 5 '19 at 22:48
As mentioned by Ragnar, the /usr directory is locked down by the system, with the exception of /usr/local. Then, if your scenario allows, I'd recommend adding the symbolic link to /usr/local/bin. If you don't have a strict requirement on using /usr/bin, that's one way to work around the "Operation not permitted" error.
One can verify if a particular file or directory is restricted by OSX's System Integrity Protection (SIP)/Rootless by listing the file flags using the -O option to ls (e.g. to see which directories in / are restricted):
ls -Ol /
The directories or files that are controlled by SIP show as 'restricted'.
There's full details in the answers to this question about SIP/rootless.
