Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you misunderstood me. The /Application folder itself is owned by root: achilles /$ ls -ld Applications/ drwxrwxr-x

Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you misunderstood me. The /Application folder itself is owned by root: achilles /$ ls -ld Applications/ drwxrwxr-x+ 55 root admin 1870 Jul 20 06:54 Applications/ But that wasn't what I meant. I meant /Applications/Postgres.app. That is owned by the user who installs it to /Applications. Here it is on my machine, for example: achilles /$ ls -ld Applications/Postgres.app/ drwxr-xr-x@ 3 achilles staff 102 Jul 18 20:17 Applications/Postgres.app/ Beyond that, you can login (with no password), this way: achilles /$ /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/psql psql (9.1.4) Type "help" for help. achilles=# I'm sure it works because I just did it. The setup is arguably insecure, but again I don't think it's meant to be a production database. It's meant, as I understand it, for a single developer to use while coding.