Updates to Files On-Demand on macOS

Ken_Tryon  That's correct, you need another account with admin access to do this cleanly, and for exactly the reason you state: some files in the user's own home directory are open while they're logged in, so it has to be done when they're logged out.

If you're referring to the (1) in parens, that's standard Unix notation that basically says "There's a man page for this command, and if you do "man 1 ditto", you'll get the page I mean." In some cases just typing man <command> is ambiguous because there might be a system call with the same name, in another section of the man pages (maybe 2 or 3), so it's customary to tell someone what section the desired man page is in.

In a standard *nix/nux distribution, since the UID is retained if the files are moved, say, by putting them on a removable disk and taking that to the other computer, then if the user who owns the files on the source computer has a different UID on the destination, they would have to chown(1) (yet another standard *nix command - for CHange OWNership) the whole directory to themselves on the destination computer. That could get sticky if the user has files in their home directory that belong to a different user (say, root). Chown (using the -R option) can walk the directory tree recursively, to maximum depth, and if those files are buried, doing that could potentially change behavior or break something. It's never an operation to be done lightly.