# Change username

Related articles

- Users and groups

Changing a username under Arch (or any flavor of Linux) is safe and easy when done properly. You can also change the associated groupname for the user if you wish. Following the procedure below will do just this retaining your UID/GID for the affected user thus not roaching any file permissions you have setup.

## Procedure

Warning: Make certain that you are not logged in as the user whose name you are about to change! Open a new tty (`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`F1`) and log in as root or as another user and su to root. usermod should prevent you from doing this by mistake.

### Change A User's Login

This will change only the user's login name.

    # usermod -l newname oldname

### Change the Real Name

This will change the real name of the username.

    # usermod -c "New Real Name" username

### Change A User's $HOME

This will only change the home directory of username. You do not need to manually create the new directory. The move is fully automatic.

    # usermod -d /my/new/home username

### Change A User's $HOME and Move Contents

This will move the contents of username's home directory to `/my/new/home` and set the user's home directory to the new one. Again, this is an automatic move.

    # usermod -md /my/new/home username

### Link A User's former $HOME to new $HOME

This will created a link between username's former home directory to the new one. Doing this will allow programs to find files that have hardcoded paths.

Warning: Make sure there is no trailing / on `/my/old/home`

    # ln -s /my/new/home/ /my/old/home

### Change Group Name

If you want to change the user's group also:

    # groupmod -n newname oldname

Note: This will change a group name but not the numerical GID of the group.

For further information see the man pages for usermod and groupmod.

### Manually With /etc/passwd

When possible, you should use the above commands to modify usernames and home directories, however for those of you who want to know the 'guts' of the operations, it can be done manually.

#### /etc/passwd File Format

Each line of the file follows a specific format. There are seven fields, each delimited by (":") a colon.

    <login name>:<password>:<numerical UID>:<numerical GID>:<Real name/comments>:<home directory>:<user command interpreter>

Warning: It is unsafe to set the <password> field in `/etc/passwd`. Passwords should be changed (by root) with the passwd command!

- <login name> This field can not be blank. Standard *NIX naming rules apply.
- <password> would be an encrypted password, however it should be marked with a lowercase "x" (without quotes) to signify the password is located in `/etc/shadow`.
- Each user and group name has a corresponding numerical UID and GID (User ID and Group ID). In Arch, the first login name (after root) is UID 1000 by default. Subsequent UID/GID entries for users should be greater than 1000. GID should match the primary group for the particular user. Numeric values for GIDs are listed in `/etc/group`.
- <Real name/comments> is used by services such as finger. This field is optional and may be left blank.
- <home directory> is used by the login command to set the `$HOME` environment variable. Several services with their own users use "/" which is safe for services, but not recommended for normal users.
- <user command interpreter> is the path to the user's default shell. This is normally Bash, but there are several other command line interpreters available. The default setting is "/bin/bash" (without quotes) for users. If you use another CLI, set the path to it here. This field is optional.

Example (user):

    jack:x:1001:100:Jack Smith,some comment here,,:/home/jack:/bin/bash

Broken down, this means: user jack (who's password is in `/etc/shadow`) is UID 1001 and his primary group is 100 (users). Jack Smith is his full name and there is a comment associated to his account. His home directory is `/home/jack` and he is using Bash.

## Gotchas

- If you are using sudo make sure you update your `/etc/sudoers` to reflect the new username(s) (via the visudo command as root).
- If you modified your PATH statement in your `~/.bashrc`, make sure you change it to reflect the new username.
- Likewise, be sure you change any config file such as `/etc/rc.local` or whatever if you are pointing it to a script or mountpoint, etc. within the old user's home directory.
- Personal crontabs need to be adjusted by renaming the user's file in `/var/spool/cron` from the old to the new name, and then opening `crontab -e` to change any relevant paths and have it adjust the file permissions accordingly.
- Wine's personal folders/files' contents in `~/.wine/drive_c/users`, `~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs` and possibly more need to be manually renamed/edited.
- The procedure to enable spell checking in Firefox may need to be redone, or else the check-as-you-type spelling might not work after renaming the user.
- Certain Thunderbird addons, like Enigmail, may need to be reinstalled.
- Anything on your system (desktop shortcuts, shell scripts, etc.) that uses an absolute path to your home dir (i.e. `/home/oldname`) will need to be changed to reflect your new name. To avoid these problems in shell scripts, simply use the `~` or `$HOME` variables for home directories.
- Also don't forget to edit accordingly the configuration files in `/etc` that relies on your absolute path (i.e. Samba, CUPS, so on). A nice way to learn what files you need to update involves using the grep command this way: `# grep -r {old_user} *`

Category:

- Security