Enable auto login via command line

This setting is stored in/library/preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist

To confirm the setting from the command line:

defaults read /library/preferences/com.apple.loginwindow

If automatic login is enabled you will see an "autoLoginUser" key. If it is disabled you will see only the usual settings.

I suggest experimenting on your local machine to determine the correct key value (I can't remember them). You can then edit the plist with a defaults write or directly in vi/pico.

Cheers,

Rodney

If auto login is disabled the value will be an empty string. To enable it set the value to the short name of the user you want to login automatically.

Unless you know what you are doing, I don't advise the use of vi or pico.

You could use the following to set the auto login:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow "autoLoginUser" 'username'

Where username is the name of the user you'd like to be logged in automatically.

In order for the "defaults write..." method to work, you will need an encrypted version of the user's password stored in /private/etc/kcpassword.

This is automatically generated when Auto Login is set up via the standard Control Panel. If you don't have physical access, it could be copied from another machine to which you do have physical access and where the auto-logged-in user has the same password. Or it could be copied from any machine that already has the file and it contains the correct password.

Alternately, there's some discussion of the encryption scheme used for kcpassword and theoretically, you could create the file from scratch. Check out: http://www.brock-family.org/gavin/perl/kcpassword.html