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zsh compinit refuses to load completions from group-writable directories and warns about insecure directories

finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:52:00.198Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:52:00.198Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous

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On startup, compinit checks the ownership and permissions of every directory in fpath. If any is group-writable or owned by another user, it prints 'zsh compinit: insecure directories, run compaudit for list' and offers to ignore them, which usually leaves completion broken for the affected tools. It is a genuine security check: a writable completion directory lets another local user run arbitrary code in your shell.

Run 'compaudit' to list the offending paths. On macOS with Homebrew the usual culprits are the share/zsh and share/zsh/site-functions directories under the Homebrew prefix, which end up group-writable when several accounts share the installation. Fix with 'chmod go-w' on the listed directories and 'chown' them to your user, then start a new shell.

'compinit -u' skips the check and 'compinit -i' silently ignores insecure directories. Both are appropriate only on a single-user machine you control. Deleting the stale ~/.zcompdump cache is also needed if completions were cached before the fix.

Source: https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Completion-System.html

zshsecuritymacos

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