Hail to the eXecute

Another great contribution to the IT community from the brilliant minds who inhabit the CLIX forum. Brunerd found a nasty bug in Microsoft’s Office 2008 for Mac installation where all files were set with an eXecutable bit, as well as all files being owned by the UID 502 (typically a second user account on Mac OS X) regardless of whether or not such a UID exists on the host system. Naturally, this poses an extreme headache to IT pros, since permissions issues are always a hassle to wrestle with.

Sadly, infamous Disk Utility’s “repair permissions” feature will only compound your woes if you went through and fixed Microsoft’s errors.

If you do get your ownership fixed on all those files, make sure to delete all the Office2008* files from your /Library/Receipts folder, lest you reverse it all with one click of “Fix Permissions” in Disk Utility.

All your hard work, right down the drain. Just another reason why /Library/Receipts is to be treated with at least one eyebrow raised at all times.

I’d like to thank Brunerd for his hard work, envy him for getting free swag, and congratulate him on having the limelight pointed in his direction. Had he not discovered this issue, I’m sure there would be quite a bit more yearly orders for desks and keyboards from the IT department due to early onset of uncontrollable head-banging-on-desk syndrome (HBOD).