FreeBSD undo uppercase characters in username

I set up a FreeNAS box a while ago and against better judgement, used an uppercase character when creating my username. This has led to a directory called George.

Now, when I later read that uppercase characters were highly discouraged, especially in the use of Samba (which I'm using), I decided I'd like to try and repair this.

What steps should I take to rename a user account from mixed uppercase to all lowercase, bearing in mind that data already exists for this user?


  • Edit the username, groupname and home path in the passwd file with vipw
  • Edit the groupname in the group file with vipw -g
  • Rename your homefolder with mv
  • Reboot the server