Last week, I helped a friend update their new to them older mac book air. I used my machine to download the most recent OS compatible with their model. Now that's completed, I tried removing the installer from my machine, only part of it will not delete because it has the restricted flag set. According to the internet, I can only delete this file by rebooting into special mode disabling SIP, delete the file, then reboot into normal mode. WTF is that bullshit? This isn't a critical installed file that's a crucial part of the OS. It's just an external file used to install an OS. Totally baffling
Sure, it’s hilarious as long as it’s not you. Otherwise, it’s beyond frustrating.
Not sure about the hard to track down issue. If you have a Mac and the App Store, they’re there for the downloading. Trying to download to run in a VM on windows or Linux violating license agreement then it is not mine nor Apple’s issue
For VMs, usually on Macs but also on licence violating machines.
Whatever the need, it’s of no consequence to Apple that it was a struggle. Having it download as an app is irritating too as it adds steps with the conversion.
There are people who will run their graphical session as root, and throw in a "chmod -R 777 /" for good measure; and there are people who will go through convoluted steps to disable runtime kernel module loading, mount / read-only, and run their web browser in a container. Now I'm definitely not on the latter extreme, but if I can have a decently-hardened system out of the box, why would I throw that away just to remove a builtin app?
Are we still talking about macOS? If so, sudo rm -f does not work on a file with the restricted flag set. Based on that, I don’t see how modifying it with a child would work either. SIP is powerful