Remove All Traces of Renamed Account Mac OSX

Question

The iMac I’m using now is a new one, but was set up using a Time Machine backup from my old iMac.

That computer I bought from a friend and instead of wiping it (had a lot of good programs on it) I used the standard tutorial to simply rename the user account.

I’ve never had any issues related to this up until now.

I just attempted to install RVM (Ruby Version Manager) and when I did, it attempted to install it into the old account name /Users/tai and was a serious pain to undo.

Obviously somewhere, something is lingering in a file that references this old user account name.

Does anyone know where and how I would go about looking for this so I can resolve this to avoid any future problems?

Answer 1

Assuming the old tai is an administrator/root account the best way to handle a case like this is to just create a new user with your username, grant that user administrator rights and then completely delete the old tai account.

A tool like RVM (Ruby Version Manager) is based on local user preferences and setup so creating a new user should suffice to clean up a mess like this.

Answer 2

Renaming a user is not recommended by most real mac users.

It causes issues.

IF you change it, you need to: chgrp -R for the user chown -r for the user pray that you don't get permissions voodoo later in life (oops you just did, too late).

your best move is to:

1 enable root, then login as root.(stay in root for all the following 6 steps). 2. go to >sys prefs > Users - 3. create a new admin account (your new name, not a duplicate of your current name) 4. open that new account folder, delete all existing folders & files. 5. open the old admin account folder, move all existing files INTO the NEW account. 6. open terminal and do the aforementioned chgrp and chown actions on that entire account folder.
for example:

root$> chown -r newbob /Users/newbob

root$> chgrp -R staff /Users/newbob