FileBot

Hi,

Using the Mac App Store version has been working fine until I upgraded to Catalina. Whenever I use FileBot now to rename TV Shows, I get a permissions error like . However I can write in that location just fine. Is there just a compatibility issue with FileBot and the new OS?

macOS sandboxes apps, which means they don't share your permissions, and can do a lot less than you can, and they especially can't access system folders (any custom folder that you create in / is a system folder, since / is reserved for system folders).

I've read that Catalina makes / file system root read-only so even root can't create /mnt for that matter. So in this case, it's not a compatibility issue between FileBot and Catalina, but a compatibility issue between how you do things and Catalina.

Presumably, you can only use your $HOME for local files, and /Volumes/<share> for remote files, just like with Ubuntu SNAP confinement.

hmm... true I've read similar. /mnt is a place I've setup via automount to connect to my NAS. But even in terminal these locations are writable. And as mentioned they are writable in Finder. As a test I used Excel to save a workbook in this location; worked fine.

Excel is not a Mac App Store application, so it's not sandboxed, so macOS is enforcing access restrictions not just on the file system layer, but also on the application layer (for sandboxed applications). That's entirely reasonable. SNAP does the same.

Just use /home or /Volumes like everyone else, or argue with Apple. The choice is yours.