How do I tell my Mac that I'm me?

October 15, 2008 7:17 AM

Question about changing my terminal prompt (and other matters) in an OS X Bash shell.

I'm not the most experienced Unix guy, but I can usually figure things out. But this one has me stumped: I just got a slightly-used Macbook Pro. The previous ower -- Michael -- gave me his admin password. So I went into System Preferences, Accounts and created a new admin, grumblebee. Then I deleted Michael.

All went well until I opened terminal, where I saw that the prompt looked like this:

michaels-mackbook-pro: ~Grumblebee

(I know that ~Grumblebee isn't part of the prompt. I just wanted to show you that I'm logged in as me and it's finding my home directory. It's just the prompt that's wrong.)

I tried to edit etc/baschrc, but it said I didn't have permission.

How can I change the prompt and is it likely I'll encounter any other problems connected to changing users?

posted by grumblebee to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

First, don't edit anything in /etc/bashrc if you don't have to. On Mac OS X you can edit ~/.profile and put a new value for PS1 in there.
posted by mkb at 7:27 AM on October 15, 2008

Best answer: The computer name you're seeing is set in System Preferences -> Sharing -> Computer Name
posted by beniamino at 7:31 AM on October 15, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks! I think that solved it.
posted by grumblebee at 8:16 AM on October 15, 2008