Guest Account Issue (OSX 10.9.4)

Question

I really would appreciate some help with a problem I am having with the guest account on my iMacs. I have a custom dock and settings however when I log out and quickly log back in it loads a default dock (including question marks) which I believe to be the default profile and not the customized dock. However, when I reboot the iMac or just wait a while after logging out the guest account works fine and has the customized dock.

I have tried running the commands:

1. To clear default profile:

rm –rf “/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/”

2. Copy the default account settings to the system wide default account:

cp –R /Users/USERNAME/ “/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj”

However I'm greeted with the below after the first command. The second command also throws up the issue of not finding the english.lproj file.

rm: –rf: No such file or directory rm: “/System/Library/User: No such file or directory 
rm: Template/English.lproj/*”: No such file or directory

Using Mac OSX 10.9.4.

Please help, it's such an annoying bug and thinking the only way to get around it would be to edit the apple menu to stop users logging out of the guest account. Thank you for your time

Answer 1

You are getting these error messages for two reasons:

1. It seems that you are using curly quotation marks (“ and “) instead of straight ones ("). Curly quotation marks have no special meaning to the shell and are thus taken as part of the file name.

2. If a space is not quoted ("escaped") on the commandline it is used to separate two words.

The combination of both issues led the shell to the conclusion that there are two arguments “/System/Library/User” and Template/English.lproj”

For the correct command either use straight quotes (here " will work as well as ') or use \ te quote any spaces. (Not both)

So first command would look either like this:

rm -rf "/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj"

or like this:

rm -rf /System/Library/User\ Template/Enligsh.lproj

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BTW: If you use bash's Tab-completion it will usually automatically quote spaces (and other characters special to the shell), so you usually do not have to take care of it yourself.