Adding and managing users and groups

Beyond the Basics

Article from Issue 183/2016
Author(s):

The command line provides all the necessary tools for creating and maintaining multiple accounts. By understanding these commands, you can more effectively manage your system.

If you have ever done any system administration, chances are you have added an account or a group. However, both tasks offer possibilities beyond the plain command. Not only do numerous options exist to modify the basic command, but a variety of other commands are available for manipulating users and groups and viewing their activities.

Users and groups are means of controlling access to a Linux system. A user account gives normal access to a system, whereas user membership in a group gives access to different hardware, subsystems, and files. Typically, each user account is matched with a group of the same name, so that users can access the files in their home directory. In some distributions, only the ordinary user created during installation has full non-root access, and you might have to add new users to each group to which the first user belongs.

Adding and Deleting

In Debian-based distributions, the easiest way to create a new user is with adduser, a script that leads you through the process. After you enter the command adduser NAME, you are prompted for a name, a password, and optional contact information that in effect turns a list of users into a contact list. Other information, such as the user ID (UID), is created for you, starting with 1000 (Figure 1). Non-Debian distributions also include adduser, but in most cases it is an alias for useradd.

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