Advanced Features

But Wait, There's More!

This chapter briefly covers some additional features added in Sandbox 2.2:

The "Human-readable Flags" setting
ACE propagation
Recursive ACL removal

Toggling Human-readable Flags

When you use the chmod utility to view a folder's ACL entries, you get a rather unfriendly string of flags that looks something like this:

list,search,file_inherit,directory_inherit

It's a bit unwieldy for most people, so by default, Sandbox displays flags in a more human-friendly form. That same list by default in Sandbox would look like:

list folder contents (read data), traverse folder (execute file), applies to child files, applies to child folders

For those who prefer the chmod-style output, or require it for some reason, Sandbox's display behavior can be toggled at any time with the Human-readable Flags setting under the View menu.

Propagating Entries

It can be tedious, if not infeasible, to lock down an entire folder hierarchy in a specific way. Given, for example, a folder containing fifty folders each containing potentially hundreds of folders, adding an entry for each folder would be an impossibly time-consuming task. To make this type of task easier, Sandbox can propagate an entry down a folder hierarchy with a single command.

With a folder chosen in the main window, select the entry you want to copy to the folders inside. If there are no entries for the current folder, add one that you would like to copy down the tree.
Choose Propagate Selected Entry... under the Entries menu.
Configure the options shown in the propagation panel that appears. (See fig. 4-1.)
Once you're satisfied with and sure of your entry and options, click Propagate Entry.

Fig. 4-1 — Propagate Entry panel

Make note of the warning in the propagation panel: Sandbox cannot propagate an entry to a folder whose ACL is out of canonical order. Folders whose ACLs are out of canonical order will be skipped.

Recursively Removing ACLs

Sometimes you just need to start over. Perhaps you propagated the wrong entry, you've gotten yourself into a permissions tangle, or something in your environment has changed and you need to start over. Sandbox takes care of this, too, by allowing you to remove all of the entries in the ACL of the folder you're currently looking at, as well as all folders inside that one, all the way down the folder structure.

After you've loaded a folder in the main window, choose Recursively Remove ACLs... from the Entries menu. Sandbox will warn you of the consequences first, and after you've confirmed that you want to proceed, the ACLs of the current folder and all of its subfolders will be cleared.