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I recently re-installed a fresh copy of Snow Leopard on my Mac. I was a bit surprised when the process completed it had changed the name of my home folder to use my name rather than my initials. This messed up all the paths in my Eclipse IDE workspace.

I vaguely remember being asked if I use it for home or business use and wondered if something I did there has a bearing on the way the default name is assigned. Does anyone have more information on this? Links too official Apple install etc.

Cheers.

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  • Never seen this before. I've installed and re-installed OS X (including 10.6) literally countless times. Did you use a different user name in the install than you had previously? Dec 24, 2010 at 9:02
  • I was looking at this page support.apple.com/kb/ht1428 It mentions the short name for an account. All I see is the full name. I can only presume I wasn't given the option because of the type of account home/business etc or somehow neglected to fill that in.
    – JGFMK
    Dec 24, 2010 at 11:39
  • Not sure what the question is here. Mac OS X always uses the shortname. If it's a fresh install, you didn't keep previous data, where there might be a conflict of old system account/new system account with the same name? You can change a user's home directory in System Preferences » Accounts » (right-click a user) » Advanced Options..., just create a second user account, rename your home folder, and change it from the other account.
    – Daniel Beck
    Dec 25, 2010 at 18:27

1 Answer 1

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The home/business question is only for registration demographic information--you can actually skip that entirely if you choose by hitting command-Q.

When you get to the account setup screens, you enter your full name. The short name is automatically generated from this by removing spaces and going to lowercase, i.e. John Doe -> johndoe, though it is still editable at this point.

The "naming convention" for the home folder is to be identical to the user short name, just like it is on any *NIX system, but as far as the short name itself is concerned, that's more of a default than a convention.

Did you use the migration assistant to restore your previous user account onto the new one? Likely you just made the mistake of not making your new account's short name match the old one, since the migration assistant simply migrates the data onto your new account instead of replacing it.

@Daniel Beck's comment is one way of going about fixing your issue, but you may need to do some chowning on the new directory.

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