UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

When I "adduser" I assign user id, home, password and name.
When I try to login as this user it says the password is incorrect.
If I go in as "root" and set a new password for the user I can then login as that user without error.

What is causing the initial password to be improperly written?
I am running unix-linux 1.3-RedHat 7.2

Not sure this will help or not. Could not find adduser in any of the man pages but did find useradd.

Redhat Docs shows useradd only adds an account name and then you must set the password.

The other info I found didn't show useradd at all but other utilities which also don't seem to set the password
Linux.Ctyme.com

Hopefully someone with more Redhat/Linux experience will post a more helpful answer.

Sorry it is useradd. If it is used as adduser could this cause the problem? I believe that i may have created the new user using adduser instead of useradd, but the new user was created.

useradd [-c comment] [-d home_dir]
[-e expire_date] [-f inactive_time]
[-g initial_group] [-G group[,...]]
[-m [-k skeleton_dir] | -M] [-p passwd]
[-s shell] [-u uid [ -o]] [-n] [-r] login

but when I assign the password it does not write it properly and I have to reasign the password to the new user under root using passwd.

I have added users with useradd now, but I am still having this problem. I have to go back into telnet as root and reset the new users passwords for them to read correctly. Any ideals what is causing this!!

On a Redhat Linux system, adduser is a symbolic link to useradd. So it doesn't matter which way that one is called.

Here is the sticker on using the -p option:
It has to already be an encrypted password.
It useful if you assign all original users the same password, but set their account to expire right away so that they have to change it the first time they log in.
The easiest way I can think of doing this would be to create one user and assign a passwd of "firsttime" (or whatever you want it to be). Grab that encrypted value out of the passwd file in /etc, and use it like this:

Code:

/usr/sbin/useradd -c "Full Name" -m -e $(date --date=yesterday +%Y-%m-%d) -p '$1$mqUt5qvn$qlkcSv46NyG2bnaK8F/wk/' username

Yes, it's a mouthful, but it can be scripted.

BTW, I did not test this, so make sure to try it out and test it before using it on a production system.

Thanks for the input!