Filed under: OS, UNIX / BSD
ChangeShortName
OS X relies on the concept of user accounts. When you set up an OS X machine for the first time (or when you are reinstalling the operating system) you are asked to create an account with a name, usually your full name, and a short name, which can be just about anything. Later on it isn't a big deal to change the longer version of the account name, however, the short name is a different story.You can dive into the NetInfo Manager and change it, but that is certainly not for the faint of heart. If you aren't a power user I would recommend using ChangeShortName, a small utility that does just what it sounds like it should. No fuss, no muss and your short username is changed (I'm making mine Zathura because I am all about product placement).
Two words of caution, Damien tells me that he has seen people's Keychains get erased after changing their account names, which isn't that big of a deal. Also, please be sure to read all the directions before you run this application, otherwise your results might not be what you expected.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Damien Barrett said 12:37PM on 11-15-2005
Scott and I were talking about this last night. What I've seen is that users' Keychains can sometimes no longer work after changing the short name and to fix the problem, you often have to delete the Keychains in question and allow them to be regenerated.
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stridey said 12:40PM on 11-15-2005
Thanks so much for this! Through a strange and complex twist of events, my account ended up being created by Apple, so my short username is my first and last name. The only problem is, that's not very short at all. I'd been toying with the idea of changing it, but it wasn't worth the effort until now.
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Freeheel said 1:13PM on 11-15-2005
Anyone do this yet? I'm a wimp, so I want to hear about others being successful before jumping myself. Come on, where are the adventurous souls?
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Alex M said 1:56PM on 11-15-2005
Jeez, that link took forever to load
Apple, you gonna take it down??
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James Balnaves said 2:03PM on 11-15-2005
Having your keychain deleted sounds like a pretty big deal-breaker. Is noone else using it to store important information (passport number, etc.)?
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ToeKnee said 2:47PM on 11-15-2005
I agree with James- my Keychain stores passwords for literally hundreds of websites -- mostly ones I manage. Sure, I can look them up again, but the Keychain is certainly "a big deal" to some people. It's one of the reason I have resisted Firefox as well-- not Keychain aware.
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Jeremey said 2:50PM on 11-15-2005
Just a warning... using this tool, I rendered my Powerbook unuseable. I couldn't log in at all. I'm sure I followed the instructions and knew the password and all that. Apparently it was just me, but I'd be real sure you know how to fix things should they break completely.
Fixing it involved booting into single user mode and mucking around with netinfo manually. That's ok for me, I'm a long-time Unix guy, but I suspect I'm in the minority.
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writedawg said 2:54PM on 11-15-2005
Be wicked careful doing this - I bunged my system up royally last year with a util like this. The problem comes in permissions to alter your old home folder. It was messy for a while - eventually leading to a straight reinstall.
I've no idea about what the new doohickey does - but be very aware that this sort of tricksy stuff can make for a very frustrating week.
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Lewis said 3:03PM on 11-15-2005
I've used ChangeShortName quite a few times without any issues. Not even the keychain issue mentioned above.
Of course you want to make sure that you follow all the directions, and that your computer is in good shape (repair permissions, DiskWarrior), before you do it.
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Damien Barrett said 4:01PM on 11-15-2005
Definitely repair permissions before and after (esp. after) you do this. I've done this at least half a dozen times and except for Keychains getting messed up (not every time), I haven't seen any other issues.
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DF said 6:12PM on 11-16-2005
Thanks for the link, Scott. ChangeShortName is one of my personal projects (along with James Bucanek, who deserves much more credit for it than I :-) ) when I'm not doing Macworld/Playlist stuff.
To respond to a few comments here:
I can't think of any reason why a keychain would get deleted using ChangeShortName, since the only thing the utility does to keychain files is (under Panther) rename them so that they match the new short username. We have had a couple reports of people whose keychains weren't automatically unlocked at login, but that's a different issue that is easily resolved -- they keychain is still there and you don't need to delete and regenerate it. If anyone has actually seen a keychain get deleted, please contact us.
writedawg: What ChangeShortName does is automatically run though the 20+ steps that you would need to go through to completely change your short username, including changing the name in a number of places in your NetInfo database, changing the name in various configuration files, and so on. Because your user account's actual UID -- which is used by the OS for permissions/privileges -- never changes, you shouldn't run into any permissions issues.
Jeremey: We've had a couple people encounter such problems, but in each case it appears to have been due to existing problems with their NetInfo database. That's the big risk with any tool that works with NetInfo -- if your NI database is corrupted, trying to edit it is likely to result in further problems.
As we've explained in the ReadMe for ChangeShortName, changing your short username is a serious process and you should make sure your system is working properly beforehand. That said, we've personally used it hundreds of times and tested it hard.
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dalton said 3:36PM on 11-18-2005
Yeah, so I ran the program, and the account I was changing has completely disappeared. Thanks!
I know there's some chance that I will be able to repair it from some backup, but thinking back now, I would say that it wasn't really worth it. Stay away from this program!
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dalton said 4:19PM on 11-21-2005
Just as an update to last week's comment, in case anyone ever sees this. I did do the database restore, and briefly saw my account again, but it was empty. Luckily I had a data backup, restored it...
And then when I rebooted, the account was gone again. Pooh!
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