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Is this normal behavior? (after renaming home folder)

J

jmacdonagh

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 30, 2007
17
0
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 said:
: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
Click to expand...

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!
 
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. ;)
 
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
 
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!
 
skye12 said:
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!
Click to expand...

You realize you can fix it, right?
 
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