title: Unable to modify permissions of folders on Mac (Mojave)
body: <p>I am new to Macs and I am trying to run some interesting stats on my iMessages using the code runner extension on VSCode. I've been following this post: <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/heres-how-you-can-access-your-entire-imessage-history-on-your-mac-f8878276c6e9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://towardsdatascience.com/heres-how-you-can-access-your-entire-imessage-history-on-your-mac-f8878276c6e9</a> </p>
  
  <p>However, when I run the line <code>conn = sqlite3.connect('/Users/&lt;username&gt;/Library/Messages/chat.db')</code>
  I get the error <code>sqlite3.OperationalError: unable to open database file</code></p>
  
  <p>Based off what I can tell my issue is that VScode doesn't have the right permissions to access the ~/Library/Messages folder and possibly the chat.db as well. First, I ran <code>ls -l</code> on Library and the result is <code>drwx---rwx</code> for Messages. So I tried to use both <code>chmod a+rwx Messages</code> and <code>sudo chmod a+rwx Messages</code> to open permissions to everything but got the error <code>chmod: Unable to change file mode on Messages: Operation not permitted</code> both times. 
  Am I doing something wrong and/or is there a better way to do this? Or is it just not possible to change the permissions of this folder?</p>