Tmux Ls Operation Not Permitted

| posted in: tmux  macos 


I updated to MacOS Ventura a day or two after it was officially released. I had been running it on one of my computers since the public betas started mid-summer. Until tonight, I haven’t had any real problems with it.

This evening I created a new tmux session and wasn’t able to run the ls command. I got this error message:

ls .: Operation not premitted

A few searches led me to a couple of articles talking about a similar issue with Apple’s Terminal app. The solution there was to make sure Terminal was listed in the “Full Disk Access” pane of “Security & Privacy” inside System Settings (formerly System Preferences).

I added tmux to that list, and quit out of all the active tmux sessions I had, then recreated one and my ability to run commands from within tmux had been restored.

Here are the steps to do the same thing I did.

  1. Open System Settings
  2. Select Security & Privacy
  3. Select the Privacy tab
  4. Select Full Disk Access from the list
  5. Click the + sign to add a new entry
  6. Search for tmux and select it
  7. Restart/recreate any open tmux sessions

I hope this was a mistake on Apple’s part that will be correcting in a future release. I really don’t want to add all the Homebrew installed utilities and applications to the Full Disk Access list.

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Mark H. Nichols

I am a husband, cellist, code prole, nerd, technologist, and all around good guy living and working in fly-over country. You should follow me on Mastodon.