ADDING_USER(8) BSD System Manager's Manual ADDING_USER(8)
NAME
adding_user -- procedure for adding new users
DESCRIPTION
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.
FILES
/etc/master.passwd user database
/usr/share/skel skeletal login directory
SEE ALSO
chpass(1), finger(1), passwd(1), aliases(5), passwd(5), adduser(8), pwd_mkdb(8), vipw(8)
BSD
January 30, 2009 BSD
