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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Sign up to join this communityI 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?
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
/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
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.