Hiding a CLI-only user account in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
5 11 2008A year and a half ago I installed the excellent PostgreSQL via MacPorts, and had to create a user account manually. Annoyingly, this postgres user shows up in the GUI login screen and Fast User Switching menu under Leopard. I found a fix today.
I dug around a few months ago, and found some options to solve this annoyance that I didn’t like very much. Changing the shell to /usr/bin/false works but then you can’t su to postgres. Changing the UID to <500 and enabling the plist option to hide <500 UIDs seems like a kludge. I was looking for a minimally invasive tweak, that would just make it not show up in that menu. Breaking the account so I can't use it the same way, or altering systemwide behavior, seemed drastic given that there are several other system accounts that have the desired behavior.
Today I decided to fix this and looked harder at what dscl would tell me about other hidden accounts. The solution that worked and didn't seem icky to me was this:
sudo dscl . append Users/postgres Password '*'
That sets the password string to *. This allows me to continue to sudo su -l postgres whenever I feel like it, but it isn't shown as an account in the GUI. Hooray!
Very useful tip. That postgres user on my login page has always annoyed me. Thank you very much!
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sudo dscl . append Users/postgres Password ‘*’ – won’t work…
sudo dscl . append /Users/postgres Password ‘*’ – will!
(Spot the ‘deliberate’ mistake? ;-) )
But great tip in any case!
Paul
Sorry – original code will work – but only after you ‘cd /’ first. P