DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages
ADDING_USER(8) DragonFly 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 Califor-
nia, Berkeley, we have groups for system staff, faculty, graduate stu-
dents, 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)
HISTORY
The adding_user procedure appeared in 3.0BSD.
BUGS
User information should (and eventually will) be stored elsewhere.
DragonFly 5.1 June 5, 1993 DragonFly 5.1