Creating User Accounts
User accounts are necessary for every person who uses a Linux box,
including the System Administrator. It's generally a bad idea to have the
only account on the system be the root account, and since Linux was
designed to be multi-user, there is no reason not to create accounts for
every single person on the system.
These steps will create a user account:
su to root
cd /usr/sbin/
./adduser username
cd /etc
pico passwd
There will be multiple lines of text on the screen; the account that was
just created is down at the bottom of the screen. It will look something
like this:
username:x:500:500::/home/username:/bin/bash
Scroll over between the blank set of colons after the numbers and put in
the user's name.
Exit pico, and type:
passwd username
The computer will prompt for a password, and then require the password to
be confirmed. This is the user's new password, which should be changed
by the user to something new as soon as they enter their account.
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Created: May 15, 1999
Last updated: May 17, 1999