| Hi Rosemary and Daniel, Hi Daniel, I did not post my reply over top of yours as I thought it best to keep it separate. As Rosemary is worried about using terminal. And as we know using root user or sudo is dangerous and you can cause serious damage if you make a mistake. If Rosemary's husband is using Mountain Lion, I feel this is a safer and easier way for her to change her husbands User Account Short Name, as it does not require the root user. This procedure has been successfully tested on Mountain Lion. What is your opinion and recommendation Daniel, of Rosemary using this procedure below to change the user account short name please? And I reiterate your advice to Rosemary.... BACKUP! Daniel, If you agree that this is the safest and easier way for Rosemary to do this, I can send her the "Offlist" instructions below in 'Rich Text' format including screenshots if she wishes. This procedure has been successfully tested on Mountain Lion. Pre-requisities: 1. Make sure you have a backup. If something goes wrong during this procedure, you will need to restore the user from backup. 2. You will need an Administrator account that is separate from the account you are changing. If you are changing your only Administrator account, you must create a new Administrator account. Change the short user name: 1. Log in as the new Administrator account 2. Run System Preferences and click on Users & Groups. Select the account you want to change and click the  'minus' button to delete the account. At the prompt, make sure that "Don't change the home folder" is selected. This will delete the account and leave all your user files intact. 3. Open a new Finder window and navigate to the "Users" folder. 4. There will be a folder with the name "oldshortname (Deleted)". Rename "oldshortname (Deleted)" to "newshortname". You will need to provide an Administrator name and password. 5. Back in System Preferences, click on the  button to create a new account. Make sure the short user name is "newshortname". Make sure the password is the same as the password for the old account. Click the "Create User" button. 6. An alert will appear that says "The Users folder already contains a folder with the same name as the home folder for this account". Click the "Use Existing Folder" button. 7. Login to your new account and make sure it works. 8. If you changed the password when creating the new account in Step 5, you will be prompted to upgrade the keychain password. You will need to use the old password to do this. 9. You will now need to rebuild the Spotlight index for your home directory. Follow the instructions in "Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes" <http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409> and add your new home directory to the Privacy list and then remove it. This will trigger Spotlight to reindex your home directory and restore functionality of All My Files. Cheers, Ronni On 29/06/2013, at 10:54 PM, Rosemary Spark <arkaysp...@gmail.com> wrote: My husband has changed his name so wants to change his user name. Not the name he logs in with, but the name of the user folder. How do I do it for him? |
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