UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I work in an Active Directory environment, and we just hired a new person. However, the manager spellt her name wrong, so I have to set up her user account all over again.

Apple has this solution in their knowledge base (a bunch of other steps are involved that aren't pertinent here):

chown -R <new_name> /Users/<new_name>

So I go to do it, using our naming scheme.

chown -R <bob.hope> "/Users/bob.hope"

I get two responses from terminal: either 'no such file or directory' or 'Is a directory'. This is frustrating because I can see the directory in the finder and in terminal, and I wouldn't tell it to be recursive if it wasn't a directory.

I'm obviously a total noob, but any help would cause me to kiss you full on the mouth.

Thanks!

Why don't you do it file by file to confirm which file it is that it is complaining about?

Also, do

ls -ld /Users/bob.hope

before hand just to confirm.

I hope you aren't actually using those angle brackets in your command?

I did - it was the only way it would take the user name with the period in it. It always gives me a 'separation of user name and group with period is deprecated'.

If I'm gonna do file by file, I might as well just do it all through the Finder - it would take less time. I just figured I blew the syntax and I could still get this method to work...

So the username actually has angle brackets in it? You do know that the shell treats angle brackets as io redirectors?

Do you not think it wise, especially when adding new users to not use a feature that is deprecated?

Sorry, that wasn't clear - the user name is bob.hope, or firstname.lastname...and no, I didn't know the shell treats those as such. I don't even know what those are.

I just know Apple turned me to the terminal to facilitate this, and it doesn't work as they specified, so I thought I'd turn to the Unix gods for help.

Do you understand what I'm trying to do? I've drug a bunch of folders from a directory that was owned by bob.hoping and put them in a new directory (generated by the OS which is bound to Active Directory) called bob.hope. All of the files now need to be owned by bob.hope...maybe I'm just going at it wrong.

Thanks so much for any and all help. And sorry I'm an ignoramus.

Hi,

The userid should not contain any "funny characters", normally they are just alphanumeric, and in some cases a few other characters are allowed.

Having any of "<" ">" ,"|", "&" will cause you extra admin headaches.

So is your user id "bop.hope" or "<bob.hope>".

Another thing with UNIX systems, is it's actually very easy to change the textual user id because the file system actually stores the numerical number against files, not the name, so all you need to do is delete the user and recreate a user with the same uid.

Say the user name was "bing.crosby" with uid "1024" and you want to change the name to "bob.hope".

And say home directory was "/Users/bing.crosby"

Code:

cd /Users
ls -ld bing.crosby
mv bing.crosby bob.hope
ls -ld bob.hope

you would now have a directory called "bob.hope" that was owned by "bing.crosby".

Now delete the user "bing.crosby".

Code:

cd /Users
ls -ld bob.hope

you should now see that directory "bob.hope" is owned by "1024".

then create a user called "bob.hope" with uid 1024.

Are you using uid's generated/maintained by AD/LDAP?

the user name is bob.hope

and we are using uids from AD.