yamahito

Hiding users from the log-in window used to be a bit of a pain pre-Tiger. But that’s thankfully no longer the case.

In the bad old days, you’d have to change a user’s UID, which is fiddly process involving NetInfo manager and chmod. When Tiger came along it seemed to become even fiddlier; you also had to set the default shell to /dev/null, which isn’t really useful for hidden admin accounts that you actually want to use locally.

However, there’s a dead easy way to do it just by editing a Preference file:

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sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array-add account1 account2 account3

Replace ‘account1 account2 account3′ with a list of accounts to hide. You will still be able to access them by clicking on the ‘other…’ pseudo-account and entering details manually. If you want to reset all accounts to unhidden, just miss off the bit at the end that starts “-array-add…”

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Apple Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.