ADDUSER(8)

NAME
adduser - procedure for adding new users

DESCRIPTION
A new user must choose a unique login name, one that does not already appear in /etc/passwd. To add an account, edit a line into the password file; be sure to lock the password file with vipw(8).

Assign the new user a group and user ID. The user ID should be unique, because it is used to control access to files. Typically, users working on similar projects are put in the same group. Thus at UCB we have groups for system staff, faculty, graduate students, and a few special groups for large projects. System staff is group “10” for historical reasons, and the superuser is in this group.

A skeletal account for a new user “ernie” would look like this:

    ernie*235:20:& Kovacs,508E,7925,6428202:/mnt/grad/ernie:/bin/csh

The first field is the login name “ernie”. The next field is the encrypted password, which is not given and must be initialized using passwd(1). The next two fields are the user and group ID's. Traditionally, users in group 20 are graduate students and have account names with numbers in the 200's. The next field gives information about ernie's name, office number, and office and home phone. This information is used by the finger(1) program. From this information we can tell that ernie's real name is “Ernie Kovacs” (the & here serves to repeat “ernie” with appropriate capitalization), his office is 508 Evans Hall, his extension is x2-7925, and his home phone number is 642-8202. You can modify the finger(1) program if necessary to allow different information to be encoded in this field. The UCB version of finger knows several things particular to Berkeley: for example, phone extensions start with 2-, offices ending in E are in Evans Hall and offices ending in C are in Cory Hall.

The final two fields give a login directory and a login shell name. Traditionally, user files live on a filesystem whose machine's single letter net(1) address is the first of two characters. Thus, on the Berkeley CS Department VAX, whose Berknet address is csvax (abbreviated v), the user file systems are mounted on /va, /vb, etc. On each such filesystem are subdirectories for each group of users, i.e., /va/staff and /vb/prof. This is not strictly necessary but helps keep the number of files in the top-level directories small enough.

The login shell will default to /bin/sh if none is given. Most users at Berkeley choose /bin/csh, so this is usually specified here.

It is useful to give new users some help in getting started, supplying them with a few skeletal files such as .profile if they use /bin/sh, or .cshrc and .login if they use /bin/csh. The directory /usr/skel contains skeletal definitions of such files. New users should be given copies of these files which, for instance, arrange to use tset(1) automatically at each login.

FILES
/etc/passwd    password file
/usr/skel    skeletal login directory

SEE ALSO
passwd(1), finger(1), chsh(1), chfn(1), passwd(5), vipw(8)

BUGS
User information should be stored in its own database separate from the password file.