Last night, while groggily honing in on the Office 2008 installer package UID problems, I missed another glaringly obvious defect: All the files are set executable, yes those files owned by 502 are also set executable. Take a look again at the lsbom dump you’ll see this everywhere: 100775. For the first two: the 10 means it’s a file, 40 is a directory. The last three (775) are significant: 7 is 4+2+1 (4:read, 2:write, 1:execute) and 5 is… that’s right: 4+1, read and execute privileges.

Now tell me does… /Microsoft Office 2008/Read Me.html need to be executable for you to look at it? Tick, tick, tick, *ding*! No. It does not let’s do another!
Does this god awful GIF bullet? /Microsoft Office 2008/Office/Media/Clipart/Bullets.localized/Red Swirl No. But it is.
Ok. One more: /Microsoft Office 2008/Office/Media/Sounds/Yeehaw? Yeah, you’re getting it. No.

The only things that needs execute privileges are directories (that’s application bundles too) and executables such as: Microsoft Word.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Word

And can you remove this execute bit in Finder? No. You have 3 choices, Read & Write, Read Only, and No Access, flip through them all and the x will still be there. You’ll need to chmod it from the terminal, but be careful, not all of them… or just give chmod -R ugo-x * a whirl, then slowly go through and chmod go+x the executables one by one and see if it still works, might be faster than the inverse… but I haven’t tested anything yet, that’s for work tommorrow… and the next day… in the mean time…

Try this: ls -lFGR /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008

You’ll be seeing red. :D

BTW: Just in case, the media I am using is Part No: X13-64625-03, I hope MS can fix this and re-press this for Volume License customers — my day job! And speaking of just in case, thanks ‘justincase’ of the Clix forums for pointing out the glaringly obvious.

So… I got a free copy of Office 2008 Digital Media Edition for free at MacWorld 2008! W00t! All because IDG double booked a room and the session I wanted got bumped until later. I instead went to see what’s new at the “Office2008:Form Meet Function” session, cute sounding eh? Within the first minute or two, to ensure our rapt attention I’m sure, our lady MC told us that we were all going to receive a free copy of Office 2008. Except, without the same flair as Oprah (she should have tried stretching it out: “You’re all getting Awwwwwww-Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!!!”) Oh well, it still felt nice to win something, especially something as pricey as the Digital Media Edition which runs $467 at CDW! I got back yesterday and after debating whether I’d sell this bad boy or install it, I went with carnal knowledge of the beast.

First things first: They’ve moved to Apple’s Package Maker (.pkg) installer files, good news for the enterprise rollouts? Well, unfortunately they’ve created all the packages to install most all of the files with the owner set to 502.

So let’s say, Mr. IT installs this on a user’s machine where the first user is the admin (501) and the standard user is Joes User (502), well, when after all’s installed, it will give Joe User (502) ownership of these folders and their installed contents:

/Library/Automator/ (if it doesn’t exist already)
/Library/Fonts/Microsoft
/Library/Application Support/Microsoft
/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008

Hmmm, that’s not good now is it? Because A) Joe User will find a way to screw it up and B) those are security holes IT does not want to have. Oh, if only they’d taken a peek at p. 1060 of Cocoa Programming, which basically says, if you let root own the file but the person installing isn’t root, it will assign that user’s id to the installed files, that’s how it should be. Instead if UID 502 doesn’t exist on your system when you install it will still assign that UID as the file’s owner anyway. D’oh!

I think I feel a chown’ing script (or an Iceberg repackaging) coming on and an uninstaller script too. “But, there’s an Uninstaller!”, you say? Yes there is and it does a lovely job of moving the Microsoft Office 2008 folder to the Trash, but it kinda misses the Application Support folder, the fonts folder (and moving the disabled fonts back), and all 97 automator actions… tsk tsk. Still, it was free!

Morning Update: It was late, I was tired (and sick), and I totally didn’t think of this one: “Fix Permissions”. 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. And no, you can’t use awk, sed, or some other readily apparent way to modify the bom files… that’s someting for the MOAB crew ;)