I want to share files between two mac osx computers, connected in the same network.

These computers are password protected etc...

so after I enable Personal File Sharing in the System Preferences I can browse to the network, find the computer I want to connect and connect to it, everything works beautifulyl!! EXCEPT....

I DO NOT want to share the ENTIRE hard drive, I only want to share certain folders on either computer. How do I do this?


Thanks in advance!

>I DO NOT want to share the ENTIRE hard drive
The entire hard drive is not shared by default. With public privilages (no password), you can only view folders which have view permissions set to "public".

So, to answer your question, simply restrict the folder permissions by choosing "Get Info" on a selected folder. You can then set permissions appropriately. Not only can you restrict public access, but you can restrict people who have login accounts on the Mac.

Actually the entire hd is there. If you log in as guest, you can only see that a drop box exists (of course you can't see the contents of the drop box).

But I'm talking about when you login as a user, then the hard drive becomes visible. The reason I want to login as a user is because I want to be able to read/modify/erase/create files on the computer

The only way I know of restricting view access of the root directory using OS X's built-in file sharing is to take away your system privalges to view the root drive.

Let me show you what I mean.
http://img184.imageshack.us/img184/9283/picture1xb7.png

In the picture above, you would simply change "ownership" to yours (enter password if necessary), which would allow you to change read/write permissions. Choose "no access" on any accounts you want to restrict access to, including yourself.

Actually, OS X's file sharing is quite limited. If you want proper sharing, you should look into more dedicated software, such as the core Unix daemons that OS X's GUI covers up, or if you don't like that idea, try Googling for standalone server utilities.

again this wouldn't work because I just want to share say 2 or 3 folders on the network that you can see when you login, I do not want to see everything that I would have access to if I was in front of my computer (in which case I would want access to everything).

Recap: I'm giving a coworker access to certain files on my computer (which I want password protected), I want them to only be able to access say 3 folders, nothing else. I do not want to have to change permissions as to what I can see. I do agree with the osx being quite limited with sharing, in windows I could have easily done this in a few steps, but cie la vie.

ok I think I am going to have to go to my "Plan B" route, I created a new regular user. I chmod that users documents folder (using sudo) to 770 and created a softlink to that folder in my documents folder. Now when my coworker logs in, they login as that new regular user, and I have a folder in my documents folder which is only the stuff they have access to. I was hoping there was an easier alternative way to do this.

thank goodness i have my unix skills that came in handy here

Glad to hear you found a (rather crude) solution yourself. Actually, Unix fiile permissions are quite limited. I hate to say this, but you can't just assign a group of users that can do this and this in a given folder, and then assign another group which has different privilages in the same folder. Sure, you can use groups, but that's still far too limited...

I agree joe, but given that there is only 1 user in this group (and assuming that's the way it stays) then i'm not too worried about this, but thanks for the info, as I'm more of a windows guy.