Changed short name to contain capitols and spaces... is this bad?
About a week ago I changed my short name from 'timdeneau' to 'Tim Deneau' just to see if it would work. I went through NetInfo Manager and changed the proper entries, moved my files, deleted the old account, reconfigured a few preferences, etc. Everything has been acting normal so I can't figure out why the system would specifically want names in the previous format. Can I damage something by doing this?
Comments
Perhaps the best thing to do in this situation is to not change a user's short name on Mac OS X. This could cause some problems down the road that you haven't anticipated.
Instead, to test your theories, I would recemmend creating a new account with the desired shortname, use it for a while to determine if all the standard features work, and perhaps then migrate your user settings to the new account.
A short name is not for your viewing pleasure, but for your computer's BSD-like core to use for operating system-related needs. The basic recommendation is to choose a simple shortname that is unique to distinguish your account from any other account, while staying away from the weird account names. Weird account names have other characters in them, such as spaces, special symbols, etc.
The damage that funky account names cause is dependent upon what BSD-like software must access your account's short name. If the software is programmed with those funky characters in mind, then that utility will not cause problems. Unfortunately most of these BSD-like system utilities are designed to work with standard UNIX account names with no funky characters, and many of these may fail when they encounter your funky account name.
I hope this is informative,
Karrick
The real problem is going to be scripts you might run, as they will choking in bad ways on the space in the name.
In general I think that it was a bad idea to go randomly messing with internals on an OS if you don't know the results. And doing so "just because" really worries me.
But no, it isn't worth it to just wait and see if something will break, so I changed it back to be safe. Interesting to see what happened though.
Often if we want a space we substitute wth an underscore, the shifted dash... (_) this places a character that to us means space but to the unix and it's age old syntax means underscore and not nothing at all. Unix depending on the age or coding will stop reading a line when it hits a space, but sometimes not. To be safe always, it is best that we just give to the OS what belongs to the OS, Follow it's rules and heirarchies and play the game it's way. Lowercase and no spaces is always a pretty sure bet.