MacOS – Deleted hash files; can’t login anymore!

This is generally really easy to clean up.

The Snow Leopard user database for all accounts on the mac is stored as flat files in the directory /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users

Just delete the offending userA.plist and userB.plist and the accounts will be "gone" after a reboot.

• boot the mac in target mode and use another mac to delete the files
• boot to single user mode (or get a root shell with sudo -s) if you are comfortable in a unix shell

There will of course be remnants of the user folders and their group membership potentially left lying around.

If you are concerned about that level of cleanliness - just boot back into a normal admin user and recreate a shell account using the same short name.

You can then correctly reset the password (retaining the home folder) or delete them cleanly and totally at that point.

Let me know if you still have a failure - it's super unlikely, but there could be a deeper problem if this doesn't work.

I haven't used WineBottler, but I'm assuming it creates an icon for the app in your Applications folder.

To run any App in OS X as sudo, open Terminal and enter the following:

sudo open -n $foo

Then drag the icon for the App from Finder into Terminal (replacing $foo in the example above). Press Enter and type your password. Voilà! Terminal launches the App as root.

Note that open -n works in Terminal to launch any $foo.app as if it were launched via the Finder. (Otherwise it's impossible to launch and OS X app via Terminal as Apps are really just specialized directories on the filesystem-level.)

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

( I couldn't resist :P )