How to rename user in Linux (also rename group & home directory)

Rename user in Linux

For renaming user in Linux systems, we will use ‘usermod’ command. Syntax for the command is,

$ usermod -l new_username old_username

For example, if we have a user named ‘dan’ & want to rename it to ‘susan’, execute the following command from terminal;

$ sudo usermod -l susan dan

This will only change the username & everything else, like group, home directory, UID will remain same.

Note:- You should need to logged out from the account you are trying to rename. You can also kill all the processes running for that user, to do so execute the following command,

$ sudo pkill -u dan

$ sudo pkill -9 -u dan

Renaming Home directory

For renaming home directory to correspond to the renamed user, we use ‘-d’ option with ‘usermod’ command.,

$ sudo usermod -d /home/susan -m susan

Changing UID for the user

To change the UID of the user , execute the following command,

$ sudo usermod -u 2000 susan

where ‘2000’ is the new UID for user.

Renaming the group

To rename the group from ‘dan’ to ‘susan‘, we will use ‘groupmod’ command. Use the following command to rename the group,

$ groupmod -n susan dan

Once we have made the required changes, we can than check the changes made using the ‘id’command,

$ id susan