Change username
 

A friend of mine just recently installed Ubuntu 7.10 and wants to change his username; both of us are pretty new to Linux so we have pretty much no idea.

I glanced through the tutorials quickly (didn't have much time because we were in class) and didn't see anything, so I'm hoping someone can help us out.

Thanks!
-Craig

I don't think I would try changing a username... I would just add a new user and copy everything over to the new account.

$ sudo useradd new-name
$ sudo passwd new-name

Logout of the old account, and in with the new one.

$ sudo cp -R /home/old-name /home/new-name
$ sudo chown -R new-name.new-name /home/new-name

Those two commands will copy everything over from the old account to the new account, then set the ownership on all the files to the new account.

Hmmm... I don't know if the new account will automatically be added to the sudo list. You might have to edit /etc/sudoers to add the new account.

Once you've determined everything is working fine, you can delete the old account with userdel, and free up the hard-drive space by deleting the old account's home dir.

You could also edit /etc/group and add the new user to the admin group. This is the group that has sudo abilities of root in Ubuntu.