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View Full Version : Is this normal behavior? (after renaming home folder)



jmacdonagh
Jun 16, 2007, 01:07 PM
I'm setting up a new iMac for my brother. We had copied all his music over, added it to iTunes, and he has had some fun customizing it.

I was doing some work on his computer and noticed that his home folder was named his UNIX short name (ben). I thought it might be nice if I renamed it to Home, so I right clicked, chose rename, and did "Home".

I opened Safari a little later and got a strange message saying the default keychain could not be loaded or found. The two options were "Cancel" and "Restore Defaults". I had been hitting Cancel a few times but it kept coming back. Sooner or later, I just hit "Restore Defaults", and it went away.

Well, a little later I opened iTunes and was shocked to find there were no files in the library. I quickly opened up the iTunes Music folder and found all of the files sitting there just fine. I decided to restart.

When it came back, I could not see any of the iTunes music files at all. Along with that, all the settings were back to default. I quickly got a backup of his music copied over, but then I started to investigate. Under /Users I found a directory named "Ben" and one named "Home". I looked under "Home", and found all his music there.

Has this happened to anyone else? Would it be wise / possible to boot using the rescue disk and rename that "Home" folder to "Ben" (to keep all his old settings)?

Thanks


mkrishnan
Jun 16, 2007, 01:20 PM
:rolleyes:

If you know about Unix, what on earth would make you think that would be a smart thing to do?

Methods to undo what you did (it's not that hard, don't worry):

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/renamehomerecovery.html
jmacdonagh
Jun 16, 2007, 01:40 PM
:rolleyes:

If you know about Unix, what on earth would make you think that would be a smart thing to do?

Methods to undo what you did (it's not that hard, don't worry):

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/renamehomerecovery.html

I do indeed know about Unix (I run Linux on my primary machine). There were two things that made me think this was OK though:

1. I had renamed it from "ben" to "Ben" without having a problem. UNIX has always been case sensitive, so I figured it might create a sym link or something like that. I figured since I was able to rename from "ben" to "Ben" (two completely different locations on a UNIX system), then a rename from "Ben" to "Home" wouldn't be a problem.

2. Why would OS X let you do it without some kind of warning (the warning when creating a user account doesn't count ;) )

Anyway, thanks for the link. After posting I Googled and found a quick solution. We're back and in working condition again. Hopefully I defended myself well enough to show that I'm not a complete idiot.

EDIT: Ah yes, it appears that although most *nix derivatives are case sensitive (which relates to their file system more than anything), apparently OS X is not. My fault!
mkrishnan
Jun 16, 2007, 01:44 PM
Heh... as for #1, Apple made the filesystem non-case-sensitive. So that is different from most of the Unix world.

As for #2, only admin users (and the root if it's enabled) have this privilege. If you set up a standard or managed user, they will not have the permission. So I guess they assume that administrators can be trusted. ;)

Glad you got it fixed. Sorry if I was a little snappy... someone new posts this thread actually about once a week on Macrumors. ;)
SC68Cal
Jun 16, 2007, 04:07 PM
mkrishnan, welcome to the club of snippy UNIX gurus. Drinks are the next table over. They're free, so please, help yourself until the pain goes away. :P
mkrishnan
Jun 16, 2007, 06:27 PM
so please, help yourself until the pain goes away. :P

The pain never goes away, my friend. :eek: :D :o
epochblue
Jun 16, 2007, 06:31 PM
2. Why would OS X let you do it without some kind of warning (the warning when creating a user account doesn't count ;) )

Given the frequency of these threads on here, I have to wonder the same thing :)
kwood
Jun 16, 2007, 07:07 PM
If you wanted to do it properly, follow this:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106824
skye12
Jun 16, 2007, 07:35 PM
I renamed mine when my ibook was a week old. Lost all my itunes files.
Spent at least an hour with applecare but no luck.

As that Apple info piece says, don't do it!
Zwhaler
Jun 16, 2007, 07:56 PM
I renamed mine when my ibook was a week old. Lost all my itunes files.
Spent at least an hour with applecare but no luck.

As that Apple info piece says, don't do it!

You realize you can fix it, right?
kwood
Jun 16, 2007, 10:30 PM
yeah, if worst came to worse you could have made a disk image of the folder to retrieve the information.