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I set up a FreeNAS box a while ago and against better judgement, used an uppercase character when creating my username. This has led to a directory called George.

Now, when I later read that uppercase characters were highly discouraged, especially in the use of Samba (which I'm using), I decided I'd like to try and repair this.

What steps should I take to rename a user account from mixed uppercase to all lowercase, bearing in mind that data already exists for this user?

1 Answer 1

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  • Edit the username, groupname and home path in the passwd file with vipw
  • Edit the groupname in the group file with vipw -g
  • Rename your homefolder with mv
  • Reboot the server
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    ...and next time trust your better judgment :-) (Really, most users can't remember which are the upper-case letters in their passwords. Letting users have upper-case letters in their usernames just doubles the chance for mistakes.)
    – voretaq7
    Aug 7, 2013 at 19:04
  • vipw did the job for the user, but I had to change the case in /etc/group too.
    – deed02392
    Aug 7, 2013 at 19:06
  • @deed02392: You are right. I forgot about that. I edited the answer. Aug 7, 2013 at 19:08
  • And what a beautiful edit it was. Cheers.
    – deed02392
    Aug 7, 2013 at 19:22
  • You also want to rename the user in /etc/aliases
    – Wayne
    Nov 25, 2018 at 16:06

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