How to fix "The update “Safari” can’t be saved."

K, I have been a bad boy for some time with a cluttered desktop and did not update to Safari 4. So I thought lets get it done and chose software update. Well, I got an error that pretty much you might have got now.

The update “Safari” can’t be saved.

You do not have appropriate access privileges.

The Installer package has been moved to the Trash. To try again, open the package from the Finder

So I looked around to see where these downloaded items are stored. Well, they are stored in /library/updates before they get deleted after the update. So The safari directory was owned by 502 and my user id did not have write access to the directory and hence the download of the update was failing. why the user id was 502 is a different story. It is very easy to get user id's mixed up on a mac. So Don't sweat and run the disk utility to fix permissions.

Simply change the permissions on the folder after becoming root. Open terminal become root by running sudo su - and then run chown -R "username' folder name as shown above.

You could do the same thing, if you get an error for quick time saying "the update "quicktime" can't be saved".

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