Hello,

I have MEPIS 7.0 and 2 accounts (a guest account and my standard user account). I want to change the names I gave to these 2 accounts. Is there a way I can do so, or must I create new accounts with the names I like then copy / paste my data from the old accounts to the new accounts.

I can login as superuser and change passwords, but I don't know if it is possible to change the account name.

Thanks.

You can change a user name with the -l option of the usermod command. You may also want to rename the user directory in /home and you may also want to change to owner of the user directory and all of its subdirectories and files using the chown command.

----------------------
Steve Stites

If you use the usermod command recommended above, you would need to chown anything because the the uid hasn't changed.

If you do it by hand by editing the passwd file, you can find the files you need to chmod and chmod them with the following command.

sudo find / -uid XXX | while read filename ;do chmod USER "$filename" ; done

Replace XXX with the old uid # and USER with the new username. There are fancy shell ways of avoiding the while;read, but this works very well and works in virtually any shell. You can score points if you tell me what I am doing it this way.

(link removed)