My System Preferences/Accounts/Login Options indicates that I have Automatic Login.

But when I restart, I am always asked for my password.

How do I fix this?

There are two preference files that could be involved, com.apple.loginitems.plist and com.apple.loginwindow.plist. Both are located in ~/Library/Preferences. Move one (or both) to the desktop, then restart. Reset your Login Options preferences and see if that solves it. If so, trash the bad boy(s). If not, put it back. I mentioned both of these because I'm not sure which one controls the preference that you are having trouble with.

Thanks Jon.

One of those plists did it. As I trashed them both, I am only 50% sure of which one was corrupt.

Usually, I am 95% sure of my actions, and even that is only 2% of the time.

another solution to that may have been to simply turn it off and turn it back on again.

If you change your account password, I think you have to do that to get it up to date with the new password.

Apple is using "security by obscurity" to hide your password for auto login, so don't expect any inside help anywhere. They don't want anyone to really understand how it works.

You're welcome, Harv. While most people tend to think that those plists had a 50-50 chance of being correct, the actual numbers are 60-60.

Not in my experience. I keep my main account with a blank password and change it to an actual password if I have to run sudo. I change it back to a blank space when I'm finished.

Actually, I think it's that if you change your account password using the Reset Password feature while booted from your install disc, you may need to toggle Automatic Login off and on again as per Virtual's suggestion.

See Automatic login doesn't work after a password reset (Mac OS X).

That link refers to 10.0 - 10.4. No mention is made of 10.5 or 10.6 so I don't know if the information applies to those OSs (and I'm not inclined to experiment).

I have no idea whether or not the information in the article is applicable to Snow Leopard; I pointed it out simply because I suspect that's what Virtual was thinking of when he referred to changing passwords.

BTW, the article does apply to Leopard:


(Notice that the article was last modified July 29, 2008, over a year prior to the release of Snow Leopard.)

and change it to an actual password if I have to run sudo.

Probably a simpler method is to set up a second admin account (always good to have a second admin acct on the computer anyway) and if you need to sudo something, LOGIN (otherusername) and then you can sudo, no need to shuffle passwords around.

Yes, I already have such an account. There are times, however, when I need to run sudo from my main account. Example: I was following Hal Itosis's advice and needed to post the results after running sudo. It was a simple matter to copy and paste the message from Terminal because I was in the main account. This would not have been possible if I had to do it from another account (unless, of course, I accessed his reply from there but it seems more convenient to simply set up a password).

Easy! Suppose you have an admin account named "super" but you're logged in as your ordinary user "joe". You need to run sudo without using fast user switching or anything like that that would swap your GUI out from under you. In that case:

$ id -un
joe
$ su -l super
password:
$ id -un
super
$ sudo id -un
password:
root
$ logout
$ id -un
joe
$

I do that all the time. Even though you've got a copy of bash running as your admin, it's still connected to your login Mach namespace, and you can freely copy and paste between windows. You can even (as I do at the moment) have two Terminal windows open, one running as admin and the other as non-admin. Or even a third running as root, through the magic of sudo -s.

Great tip! I'll have to try it sometime. Still, for my level of "expertise", it seems easier to just change the password.

Out of curiosity, Jon, why are you jumping through hoops rather than just having established a permanent password?

I am, for all intents and purposes, the only user of the computer. I find it much easier to simply press Return when I'm asked to authenticate with a password. I use sudo so rarely that it would be more trouble than it's worth to establish a permanent password.

Actually, my wife uses the computer occasionally but only for email. She neither knows nor wants to know how things work. If she runs into a snag, she calls for me to get her out of it.

I rarely have to enter the password on my mac. That's one nice advantage of how the system is engineered, most things have a "sensible" level of protection, and you are generally only obligated to provide your password when it makes sense to do so. (unlike some others I can think of, "mouse has moved - Cancel or Allow?")

But on my service machines, I would constantly be authenticating due to the nature of what I have to do all day long. So for those we have autologin as root. ("in for a penny, in for a pound")

Considering the voluminous quantity of posts under your belt, I'd guess that tapping on the keyboard is not an activity to which you're adverse. There aren't that many occasions (per any given day) where passwords are required. Though the person behind the keyboard may feel like the "only one" using it... being connected to the Internet does add another dimension to that notion. Not having any password whatsoever (as opposed to a simple JKL<return> perhaps) might be taking the concept of user-friendly to a careless extreme... just to save a few seconds per day.

Not disagreeing here, but I think that the sudo -s method (as ganbustein mentioned) is a fairly painless way to get almost all the same benefits, with far less potential for a (GUI) disaster.

It does seem odd I'll admit that a program such as DiskWarrior asks for a password at every launch, when there are (acceptable) methods to have it retain its authorization across launches. They should offer it as an option anyway.

It does seem odd I'll admit that a program such as DiskWarrior asks for a password at every launch, when there are (acceptable) methods to have it retain its authorization across launches. They should offer it as an option anyway.

Some apps do that, cocktail comes immediately to mind as does Spotless. DW just happens not to. In all three cases, it's always required one way or another.

Tho some apps won't even run properly if you are logged in as root, which I find funny. (and there's still that quirky "can't Save As PDF when logged in as root)