From Tethys on 10 May 1998
Yep. It's called adduser :-)
It's present in all versions of RedHat I've used. It's not very
configurable (although you can change defaults by editing the
script itself), but it gets the job done.
It's in /usr/sbin, which may not be in your default path, although
for root it really should be.
Tet
The shadow suite comes with a much more powerful set of commands including: useradd, userdel, groupadd, groupmod, and groupdel. These contain switches to specify full name, home directory, shell, primary group, a list of other groups, and other information (you can even specify which UID should be used as the "base" or force it to "overlay" the new account's UID with an existing one --- if you absolutely must have multiple accounts share the same ID).
It appears (from my experience with Sun/Solaris systems) to be completely compatible with the equivalently named commands on those systems --- so creating scripts and even CGI forms to process new accounts en masse is pretty easy.
It does seem to require that you use "shadow" passwords --- but basically any system should do that in any event (and it should be the default for all distributions --- blast it!).
(Unfortunately that still isn't the case. Grrr!)
versions | lilo | virtdom | kernel | winmodem | basicmail | betterbak |
shadow | dell | dumbterm | whylinux | redhat | netcard | macrovir |
newlook | tacacs | sendmail | dialdppp | ppp233 | msmail | procmail |