bsd man page for adduser

ADDUSER(8)						      System Manager's Manual							ADDUSER(8)

NAME
       adduser - procedure for adding new users

DESCRIPTION
       A  new  user must choose a login name, which must not already appear in /etc/passwdor /etc/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  con-
       fuse  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's 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 Univer-
       sity 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/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.

FILES
       /etc/master.passwd  user database
       /usr/skel	   skeletal login directory

SEE ALSO
       chpass(1), finger(1), passwd(1), aliases(5), passwd(5), mkpasswd(8), vipw(8)

BUGS
       User information should (and eventually will) be stored elsewhere.

4th Berkeley Distribution					 October 23, 1996							ADDUSER(8)