On 2010-03-23, at 12:47 PM, chris wrote:
Lucy;
I'm afraid you've run into the border area where the usual OS X ease of use has been deceptively covering up unix stuff, this leads to grinding of teeth from linux/unix experts who are used to working in the command line/ Terminal.
"sudo" prefixing a command gives the command administrator or "root" privilege i.e. the command will have access to all areas of your system - you are right to be cautious.
Just to add to that, at least on my system, the sudo prefix is necessary because the regular user does not have write access to the folder /usr/local/texlive/ where the database is stored. I am pretty sure that is standard setup in Mac OS X. Thus, I said that not because I wanted to wreak havoc on your system, but rather to assure texhash has the desired effect. And yes, the password should be the same as the admin password.
JJ