zsh compinit: insecure directories

Question

What does it mean and how can I fix it?

zsh compinit: insecure directories, run compaudit for list.
Ignore insecure directories and continue [y] or abort compinit [n]?

Running the compaudit returns the follows:

There are insecure directories:
/usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions

Answer 1

This fixed it for me:

$ cd /usr/local/share/zsh
$ sudo chmod -R 755 ./site-functions

Credit: a post on zsh mailing list

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EDIT: As pointed out by @biocyberman in the comments. You may need to update the owner of site-functions as well:

$ sudo chown -R root:root ./site-functions

On my machine (OSX 10.9), I do not need to do this but YMMV.

EDIT2: On OSX 10.11, only this worked:

$ cd /usr/local/share/
$ sudo chmod -R 755 zsh
$ sudo chown -R root:staff zsh

Also user:staff is the correct default permission on OSX.

Answer 2

These two lines have fixed for me.

sudo chown -R _user_:root /usr/local/share/zsh

sudo chown -R _user_:root /usr/local/share/zsh/*

Answer 3

This morning, some packages in my system updated, and left me with this error message. I am using Ubuntu 18.04.

Apparently, something in the update changed the username and group to numbers, instead of root, as so:

# There are insecure files: /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_code
# sudo ls -alh
-rw-r--r-- 1  131  142 2.6K 2019-10-10 16:28 _code

I simply changed the user and group for this file back to root and the problem went away. I did not need to change any permissions, and would caution against doing so unless the underlying cause of the problem is understood.

sudo chown root _code && sudo chgrp root _code

After switching 131 and 142 back to root, this error message from zsh went away.

Answer 4

My suggestion would be to run compaudit and then just fix permissions on the directories found by the audit. Make sure the identified directories do not have write permissions for group or other.

Answer 5

The accepted answer did not work for me on macOs Sierra (10.12.1). Had to do it recursive from /usr/local

cd /usr/local
sudo chown -R <your-username>:<your-group-name> *

Note: You can get your username with whoami and your group with id -g

Answer 6

This works for my Mac after the update to High Sierra.

Remove group write access:

sudo chmod g-w /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions
sudo chmod g-w /usr/local/share/zsh

It’s best to keep the change limited to the scope of zsh directories.