Changing Your Home Directory Name in OS X Lion

I just purchased a new MacBook Pro and ran into a small hiccup with my user home directory in OS X Lion. When I setup my new account and used the same shortname as I had on my previous MBP. Using Migration Assistant I was not allowed to migrate my old user account since it had an identical name. In my case the path to the user’s home directory was /Users/db. So for Migration Assistant to properly migrate my data via Time Machine I had to give the new account a short name of db_old. Now I do a lot of work from the command line and seeing /Users/db_old in my path was a little disconcerting.

Initially I used Terminal to mv /Users/db_old to /Users/db but this called all sorts of problems with my apps not loading not to mention other hassles. After doing a bit of Googling I found out this was possible by following these steps:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1428

The Caveat was that the link to “Enable Root User” in this article was not applicable for my setup. I’m not sure that will be your case, but if it is then be sure to reference this article:

http://www.macosliontips.com/tips/enable-root-account-in-mac-os-x-lion.html

After enabling the root user I was able to proceed with the steps in the Apple knowledge base article above. I created a new account with a short name of db (my original short name) and then deleted my old account with short name of db_old. When I rebooted and logged into the db account I verified that everything was working properly.