UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

greetings. I'm using debian lenny, bash shell environment.

It is my understanding that by default, the useradd command should create subdirectories under the /home directory, with the same name as the user being created, but this is not happening.

I checked useradd -D and it showed, among other things

HOME=/home

I even tried to override the default by doing useradd -d /home/bob bob but still no directory was created.

During the debian install, i was prompted to create a user, and a home directory was created, but not now.

I checked the configuration file /etc/default/useradd and all the lines were comments except SHELL = /bin/sh, but I figured that shouldn't be a problem because useradd -D showed the correct defaults.

p.s. I am logged in as root.

Try looking up the "-m" switch in "man useradd".

Well that solves that one. The tutorial I was reading made no mention of -m. I looked at man, but stopped when I "thought" I had the answer.

I guess the moral of the story is, it pays to look over the whole man page, even when you think you have already found what you need to know.

Thanks!