Hide a admin account in System Preferences

Question

Hi, I am trying to hide a admin user in the Accounts Pane in System Preferences. I followed the only instructions I could find http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080127172157404, but it only hides it in login and fast user switching. Anybody got some ideas?
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Dyenera,
Follow these steps to hide a user from the Accounts pane in System Preferences:
1. Right click on the account you want to hide in the Accounts pane in System Preferences and choose "Advanced Options". You should be logged in as another admin account while doing this with the Accounts window unlocked.
2. Change the User ID to a number between 300 and 499. e.g. 401 is usually free. You can check which numbers are free by executing "dscl . -list /Users UniqueID" in the Terminal. You will see a list of all the accounts on the machine most of which are already hidden and used various services in OS X.
3. Change the Home Directory setting to /var/nameof_user_tohide so that other admin users won't delete it inadvertently or otherwise.
4. Click OK to save these settings and then quit System Preferences
5. You need to move the user's home directory to /var and change the ownership of the user's home folder now that you have changed the user's ID. E.g. In Terminal:
mv /Users/nameof_user_tohide /var
chown -R 401 /var/nameof_user_tohide
6. Tell OS X to hide user's with a User ID less than 500 (This wasn't required in earlier versions of the OS): In Terminal: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow Hide500Users -bool YES
7. Reboot and enjoy!