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Is there a way to show only some users in the login panel? I'm using OSX 10.6, and if I recall correctly I did something like that in a distant past but I really can't find out how.

In the system preferences there seem to be nothing like that (neither in Accounts nor in Security, for instance), and Tinkertool does not do that. Google didn't help.

edit: I hoped there was a graphical solution, such as while hiding them from the first screen, having also a button like "show all". I guess there isn't or somebody would have answered. Maybe I'll just change the usernames adding leading Z at the start of the usernames of the ones to "hide", so they'll appear lower in the list... :/

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4 Answers 4

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There doesn't seem to be a way to do this graphically, but it is possible. As always, be careful when setting system-wide defaults like this, especially with sudo. I tested this just now and it seems to work as expected.

To hide specific accounts, run the following command in Terminal.app:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array username1 username2 ...

If you want to add a new account to hide:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array-add username1

To unhide all users you've hidden:

sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList
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You CAN do this graphically. If you get Xcode it comes with a tool called property list editor. Go to /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow and open it highlight the hidden users list and then press the add child button and then type the short user name of the user you want to hide!

(you can find Xcode on the 10.6 OS X install DVD, do not make the mistake of downloading it from the internet as iDid)

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My user account on my laptop is hidden, annoys me, but I can't get it to un-hide.

What I did was change the UID of that account to 1000 (to match the UID of my account on our NFS server). I suspect this is what removed my account from the login screen.

Be careful changing your UID (can be done through the advanced settings in the user pref pane). Doing this will not fix file ownership. You must do this by hand.

Make sure you leave yourself a clean admin account so you can fix things if they break.

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  • so you are suggesting that I might hide some users changing their UIDS to go out of a range?
    – o0'.
    Jan 26, 2010 at 11:23
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    That seemed to do it for me (accidently, I didn't actually want to hide my account). The comments in the post marked as a dup may actually work better.
    – skarface
    Jan 26, 2010 at 14:48
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While there appears to be nothing that graphically allows you to hide and show users, you can add a | to the beginning of the user displayed name, so that he appears last in the list. Another sign which does that is §. Some other signs instead make the user appear on top of the list.

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