CREATING ACCOUNT NAME

What in a Name?

  When creating an account (System Preferences - Account - New User...) – either the initial account upon installing Mac OS X, or an additional account—you’ll  be prompted for both your Name (e.g.,John Jacob Jingle heimer Schmidt) and something called a Short Name.

Your Short Name is your actual username , or in login name, the name by which your computer knows you.  It is usually three to eight characters long, composed of letters or numbers.  While OS X attempts to choose a sShort Name for your based upon what you entered as your Name, it doesn’t do a particularly good job if your namr isn’t as simple as Sam Smith.  And, trust me. You don’t want to spend your days being known by your computer as johnjacobjungleheimerschmidt.  Choose something short anbd quick to type, like john, johnj, or schmidt.  Here’s why...

Your Home Directory

Your home directory is where you’ll be keeping all your stuff . In it you’ll find special directories for your documents, pictures, movies, and setting  (that’s what the Library is).  Of course, you’re not forced to organize your stuff this way, but it is a good convention.  Feel free to settle in., create new folders, and shuffle thingd about it.  It’s generally a good idea not to throw out the special folders; as the operating system and its applications often make use of them and expect to be there.  In oparticular, don’t touch  your Library folder; it’s the home of your preferences, settings, abd other pieces used by particular applications.

If you chose john as your Short Name, then your home directory will be Macintosh HD - Users - John.  By creating a central place for all your important data, OS X ensure easy backup or deployment on other machines.  Instead of having yo single out your favorite control panels or extensions from OS 9, you can simply backup your home directory.  When you’re ready to restore, simply copy it over to the same location, and your environment (iTunes music library, desktop picture, added software tweaks, etc.)  will take effect the nextime tiome to you log in.

From the command line’s (hack #48) point of view, your home directory again, assuming you Short name is John—is /User/ john.  You’ll sometimes see it referred to on the command line as˜. It’s a shortcuts that saves you from having to type out your full login name when referring to your home directory.  So ˜/ Documents actually refers to /Users/john/Documents (Macintosh - HD - User - john - Documents in the Finder).

Deleting an Account

Deleting an account under, Mac OS X is simple using the accounts System preferences panel (System Preferences - Accounts - Delete User).  This will remove the account and disable the associated home directory.

Deleted accounts, however, are gone but not completely forgotten.  If you take a moment to actually read the co0nfirmation dialog shown in figure 1-7, you’ll learn that the contents o0f the now-deleted account’s home directory are archived as adisk image in Marcontish HD - User - Deleted User.

When and if you’re to permanently delete the contents of an archived home directory, simply g-drag its disk image to the Trash.