If you set up your new Mac and don’t pay close attention, your short name (which is used for UNIX directories) might turn out kind of goofy. Moreover, if you have two Macs with two different short names, a lot of your automation scripts may not work without a lot more baby-sitting than they’d require if you had identical short names. For the longest time, changing your short name in OS X was a lot more difficult than it should have been and fraught with opportunities to screw up your Mac. I thought that continued to be true until I read this post by Dan Frakes yesterday. 

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