adding_user -- procedure for adding new users
A new user must choose a login name, which must not already appear in
/etc/passwd or /etc/mail/aliases. It must also not begin with the hyphen
`-' character. It is strongly recommended that it be all lower-case, and
not contain the dot `.' character, as that tends to confuse mailers. An
account can be added by editing a line into the passwd file; this must be
done with the password file locked e.g. by using chpass(1) or vipw(8).
A new user is given a group and user id. Login and user id's should be
unique across the system, and often across a group of systems, since they
are used to control file access. Typically, users working on similar
projects will be put in the same groups. At the University of California,
Berkeley, we have groups for system staff, faculty, graduate students,
and special groups for large projects.
A skeletal account for a new user ``ernie'' might look like:
ernie::25:30::0:0:Ernie Kovacs,508 Evans Hall,x7925,
642-8202:/a/users/ernie:/bin/csh
For a description of each of these fields, see passwd(5).
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/share/skel
contains skeletal definitions of such files. New users should be given
copies of these files which, for instance, use tset(1) automatically at
each login.
/etc/master.passwd user database
/usr/share/skel skeletal login directory
chpass(1), finger(1), passwd(1), aliases(5), passwd(5), adduser(8),
pwd_mkdb(8), vipw(8)
User information should (and eventually will) be stored elsewhere.
The adding_user utility appeared in 3.0BSD.
FreeBSD 5.2.1 June 5, 1993 FreeBSD 5.2.1 [ Back ] |
