Help! Change the short user name?

adambyte

adambyte

Registered
Alright... I've been living quite nicely with Mac OS X on my Powerbook, but I've decided I want to change my identity as a user on th machine... I know that if I go into the "user" part of system preferences, I can change the Name (the full long one) easily, but can anybody help me change the short user name, which is also the name of my folder and such? I'm too lazy to make another user and have to transfer and change all my settings again. I suspect I'd have to do some command line stuff.... can anyone help me change my name?
 
You can do this using NetInfo Manager in /Applications/Utilities. In the directory browser, go to Users/[your user name]. Down below, you'll see a pane with a list showing properties and their corresponding values. There's an authentication lock you open with your admin password, and then you can change your short user name in the values column.
NOTE: There are four properties that use your short username, so be sure to change all four. When you're done, also make sure to save your changes.
 
And possibly the owner of all the itmes in the user folder?
Please post if this is true or not.
 
ack.
I needed to change my short name and I followed the instructions above - using the teinfo manager utility I changed the name in the four places in the users file.

then I tried to change the name of my user directory but was not allowed to, saying I didn't have privlages

I logged out and in again and of course all of the apps that needed to use my home directory weren't. It created my a temporay new user directory that was empty.

to solve this problem I had to boot with OS9 and then erase and rename the two user directories.

now everything seems ok so far, but it freaked me out.

QUESTION 1:how does one act as a root or a 'unknown'? - administraters still seem to have restrictions

QUESTION2: hoe does one change the owner of a file?
 
Hello,

From net info manager you can enable root
Domain ->Security->Enable Root Access

From terminal

su root
enter password
chown newUserName directory

do a "man chown" to see about sub directories (recursion)
 
Thanks! but... :(
Things are in really bad shape here. After I changed my short name I lost my administrator status and I now have no administrators on the system. This means that I am unable to domain->security->enable root access. In fact I'm unable to do much of anything.
Above I explained that in order to change my home directories I had to go into OS9. Is there any way I can either log on as root in OSX, set a user as an administrator via OS9, or do anything to get back control of my computer??

thanks so much for the help!
Neil:
 
When I had the distinct displeasure of admining a linux box I had to rerun the installer to reset the root password.

Try doing a *non clean install* Theoretically it will not touch your current users and user libs. The installer will let you create a new admin user. But then again the 10.0 installer may want to reinitialize the drive - see what it wants to do.
 
Well, I logged in as root, changed the names in netinfo, changed the username folder to to the same thing, and it works fine. However, I DID have to reset myself to "Administrator" status while in root, after I did all the changing. And now everything with me seems to be working fine, so thank you.
 
I think adambyte did things the right way and I did not. When changing the dhort name, I did not log in as root first, so I was unable to set myself as an administrator.

I tried to reinstall the OS but it prompted me to enter an admin's name and password in order to run the CD - again no administrators exist. What I need to do, I think, is find the actual file where the administrators are specified and change it in OS9.

or I might have to reinstall totally. which would suck.

Also, I'm sure there are ways of forcing into root status - I just don't know how.

Neil
 
Yeah, I did it the right way. I was lucky and took all the precautions... and now I see I'm VERY lucky...
 
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