Macs are infuriating and I need help [User Accounts]

[InnocentBystander]

I'm livid here, I can't get printer sharing to work, and what should have been an obscenely simple task has turned into a nightmare. I went to change the name on my mom's account because she had changed her name, however because the "Short Name" is unchangable I decided to just create a new account.
So I log in as this new account and despite its admin status I'm unable to move the contense of the old documents folder over.
So, I go to log back in to the old account and I'm in a completely different account and the whole thing is just a mess.

There are 3 user folders, the first folder has the new name of the old primary account and contains the files. The second folder has the name of the new account I created, and that is fine. The third folder is the active user folder when I log in as the renamed primary account but is named after the old short name.

Both accounts were effectively empty and needed to be recofigured with email accounts, bookmarks, etc. What the fuck did I do and how can I put things back?

[Xisiqomelir]

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/h/234

[Stark]

I hear when you do something wrong, it's not your fault? I'm currently using LAN, wLAN and USB-shared-from-XP printers with Mac and have no problems.

The account-name/homefolder thing is also common to XP: I've seen systems with three or four iterations of accounts from renamings etc.

I've only had user-rights problems on Mac with networked drives and incorrectly set ownerships (ie, folders owned by account a containing files owned by account b).

[Durandal]

If this were Linux, I would suggest cracking open /etc/passwd and changing the username keeping the same UID. It would be pretty trivial to do (open /etc/passwd in your favourite text editor, find the row with your username (probably near the bottom), delete the old name, put in a new one, keeping everything else the same, save the file, done. Should be painless; if you furthermore wanted to change the home directory too, same procedure, change the name in /etc/passwd, then rename the folder in the filesystem as your normally would), but I have no idea if Mac OS does it in a similar way.

/etc/passwd isn't authoritative on Mac OS X. A local NetInfo database stores data about users, including password hashes, shadow hashes, account name, home directory location, etc ... If InnocentBystander wanted to change the short name on his user account, there are ways to do that. But at this point, I have no idea what he's done to his system.

[InnocentBystander]

Alright, so it looks like I fucked up and killed the assocation between the root user and its original home directory. How can I link a user account to a home directory?

[Durandal]

Alright, so it looks like I fucked up and killed the assocation between the root user and its original home directory.

The root user is disabled by default. I highly doubt you touched it.

How can I link a user account to a home directory?

By default, a user's home directory is located at /Users/<UserName>. Once you name the directory appropriately, execute the following in the terminal.

$ sudo chown -R <UserName>:<UserName> /Users/<UserName>
$ sudo chmod -R 700 /Users/<UserName>

Enter the logged-in user's password when prompted.