On Sep 15, 2010, at 3:42 PM, Kino wrote:

> The only user I know to have such a peculiarity is the root user.

Ah, but I don't know what happens when you enabled the sharing of some services for users whose home directory does not exist in your Mac. I'm not networking.

Also, the first thing I do just after installing a new major version of OS X is to enable the root user (then, I do some basic configurations from the root account) and usually I have "Display login windows as" in Login Options of the Account Pref set to "Name and password", not to "List of users". So I'm not in a position to diagnosticate accurately your problem (if it were a problem).

*Perhaps* "Others..." should appear in the login window even if you have not enabled the root user. That is not unlikely though meaningless, because, AFAIK, the login window is the most buggy part of OS X, which is updated very frequently although the changes are not mentioned in release notes.

As for your original query, namely "The only Terminal command routines which I have been able to find will work in Tiger but not in Snow Leopard", it does not work in Snow Leopard because Apple has changed the way OS X handles users. In earlier versions of OS X (and Next/Open Step), they were managed by  NetInfo Manager.app and its terminal command equivalents, of which I'm quite sure that "Terminal command routines" you found consist. However, Leopard removed NetInfo Manager.app and the associated Terminal commands and replaced them with Directory Utility.app and Terminal commands associated with it.

So, the "Terminal command routines" should be rewritten if you want to use them in Leopard and Snow Leopard. So do I think but my poor knowledge cannot and I tend to think what the "Terminal command routines" used to do would be able to be achieved via GUI, that of Directory Utility.app.


On Sep 14, 2010, at 5:22 PM, Doug Browne wrote:

> As I am the only user, I do not need the Shared folder:   Macintosh HD - Users - Shared. But this is another thing that always reappears after trashing.

I hate to say but I think you should not delete anything created by OS X by default unless you have special and good reasons to do so. Some applications -- even if you have been/are not using any -- assume that what is created by OS X by default does exist, /Shared folder in this case.

In my /Users/Shared, I find "CNQL2406_Driver.bundle" which is required by my very cheap Canon Scanner (I don't know how it is called outside of my country), some setting files created by Kawasemi (Japanese input method far better than Apple's) and a folder used by Adobe AIR updaters. I don't know how those apps behave when /Users/Shared does not exist.

Note also that an empty folder eats very, very small disk space. Finder says it is Zero KB and ls (Terminal command) reports it to be only 68 bytes, negligible from any possible point of view, I think. In some situations (e.g. you are running a very old version of OS X), the number of nodes may matter but the latter is practically infinite in Leopard family (though I cannot find the document related to this topic I read last year, just now; sorry I cannot give you a URL).

Good night, good morning


Kino