Anyone whose ever imple­mented net­worked home direc­to­ries on and OS X Server has prob­a­bly come across the need to add or remove pref­er­ence files from user accounts. Chang­ing set­tings for new accounts is easy, just add the files to the User Template folder.

Exist­ing users is a dif­fer­ent story though. They already have their home direc­to­ries. Depend­ing on how many users you have, adding/deleting files from you old users can be a daunt­ing task. Ten users is easy enough, but 50 is silly and over 100 is ridiculous.

Long ago I wrote a series of scripts (well actu­ally just one) that I use and modify for what­ever files I need to change. I basi­cally just loops through each home folder in a spec­i­fied direc­tory. It’s really a pretty basic script. Here’s an exam­ple of one that I was using:

# Copy new dock and fix permissions

echo "\ncpdock.sh"

dir=`ls $1`

cd ${1:?"No directory specified!"}

echo "PWD = `pwd`"

echo "\n$dir\n"

for folder in $dir; do
    echo "...copying dock plist to $folder"
    cp /com.apple.dock.plist $folder/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
    chmod -R 700 $folder/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
    chown -R $folder:staff $folder/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
done

That’s easy enough. It’s kind of a pain though to modify the scripts all the time. Also, it’s very dif­fi­cult (and scary) to try and explain how to use these scripts to my less Bash-​inclined co-​workers.

The other day I found this great little piece of soft­ware writ­ten by Nicole Jacque called Home Direc­tory Helper. It does exactly what all of my scripts did, except with an easier to use GUI inter­face. Very nice, and highly recommended.