MacOS
Shine a spotlight on sagacious solutions to your most maddening Mac maladies Prompted for password in Home folder
QWhen moving files within my Home folder, macOS keeps prompting me for my password. Is there something wrong with my permissions?
AThis is almost certainly because the permissions on parts of your Home folder have become set incorrectly, and is one of a dozen consequences of that. More specifically, it’s likely to be the result of you, as the owner of most of the folders and files within your Home folder, losing the permission to both read and write almost everything within.
Apple documents this at bit.ly/mac352hmpr, where it explains how it recommends you address this. The treatment involves selecting your Home folder in the Finder, and using the Get Info command to show its permissions, at the foot of that dialog. There, change the owner Name if necessary to yours, and the Privilege to Read and Write. Then open the cogwheel tool and Apply those changes to all enclosed folders and files.
Apple used to recommend that you followed that procedure with running the diskutil command tool in Terminal, but has recently dropped that step. You’ll also notice that Apple shows that you should set staff privileges and those for everyone to Read only, but that isn’t best practice and shouldn’t be necessary.
A side effect of this is that the next Time Machine backup is likely to include almost everything in your Home folder. You may prefer a more selective approach to discover which folders and files need permissions corrected. That’s available in my free PermissionScanner from bit.ly/mac352kyprm.