Account login weirdness OS X

1

Running Mac OSX 10.10.5

So I recently changed my account name and home directory name per these directions. All characters in the name are lowercase alphabetical. After making the change I was unable to log in to the renamed account (it wasn't even listed as an option). Some nice people at Apple Support and I have spent a large portion of the day trying to figure out what is wrong. There is some serious weirdness. Here are the main points.

I still cannot log in to my account via the normal log in screen.

My account is still entirely intact. I shows up in System Preferences under Users and Groups (a shell command corroborates this), and all my files seem to be there.

I can log in to that account using the shell command "su - username", and peruse/edit my files like normal.

At one point we attempted to delete the account, in the hope that it would move to "Deleted Users" where maybe we could restore it to normal. It denied us. That seems pretty unusual.

At this point I'm just grasping at straws. Anyone know any solutions or work-arounds?

Alex

Posted 2015-10-28T05:02:08.670

Reputation: 141

Really hard to even guess without more info, like at the very least what version of OS X you're using. Also, what's the new account name and home folder (and does the name start with "_" or ".", or contain any punctuation, non-ASCII characters, etc)? – Gordon Davisson – 2015-10-28T05:09:50.043

Good point. I'll edit my post more. – Alex – 2015-10-28T05:10:53.033

What error message did you get when attempting to delete the account? Also, I take it you migrated the home directory correctly and rebooted the machine at some point (hopefully very soon after) the username change? – Blacklight Shining – 2015-10-28T07:18:11.237

You refer to the username a few times in your question, but it's not quite clear whether you mean the old or the new one. Can you edit again to clarify that? – Blacklight Shining – 2015-10-28T07:19:01.523

Answers

0

I'm OP. I just remembered that I already had an account on Super User.

So I figured out a work-around. I created another admin account and swapped the account names and home directory name with the account I couldn't log into. I was then able to log into the account, but all the files were still owned by the account I was unable to log into. I moved out to the top directory and executed "sudo find . -user olduser -exec chown newuser {} +". It looks like it worked. I hope there was no damage done by my command. I wanted to call sudo to force the change of owner regardless of permissions.

Alex

Posted 2015-10-28T05:02:08.670

Reputation: 141

Little unclear with the names again. Do you mean that you changed the username and homedir name of the newly-created user to the username of the account you were unable to log into, or…? – Blacklight Shining – 2015-10-28T07:28:51.780

1I had an account name and home directory called <badlogin>. I made another admin account called <temp>. I then made the swap <badlogin> ---- <temp> and <temp> ---- <badlogin> for both the account name and home directory. For whatever reason I could now log in to <badlogin>, however, all the files in the <badlogin> home directory still belonged to the original <badlogin> (now <temp>). I had to switch ownership of all files on the computer from <temp> to <badlogin>. I restarted my computer and everything worked like normal. – Alex – 2015-10-28T15:53:57.073

It was alerted to me that this might have been the actual problem.

– Alex – 2015-10-28T15:54:16.887

I can't login to the account that made this question as I did it as a guest, and the email addresses are identical. Could a mod just mark this the answer without giving me reputation? – Alex – 2015-10-28T16:09:53.177

I did. The support request requires that I supply two separate profile URLs. I cannot get to the account that made this question because logging in with my email simply logs me in to this account. Thus I cannot get the other accounts URL. I couldn't even mark this question answered even if I wanted to. – Alex – 2015-10-28T22:40:26.237

Ah! I don't know why I didn't think of that. Thank you. – Alex – 2015-10-29T03:17:22.600

Asked: 2015-10-28T05:02:08.670

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Active: 2015-10-28T07:13:13.563