Annotation of 43BSDTahoe/man/man8/adduser.8, revision 1.1.1.1

1.1       root        1: .\" Copyright (c) 1980 Regents of the University of California.
                      2: .\" All rights reserved.  The Berkeley software License Agreement
                      3: .\" specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution.
                      4: .\"
                      5: .\"    @(#)adduser.8   6.4 (Berkeley) 10/1/87
                      6: .\"
                      7: .TH ADDUSER 8 "October 1, 1987"
                      8: .UC 4
                      9: .SH NAME
                     10: adduser \- procedure for adding new users
                     11: .SH DESCRIPTION
                     12: A new user must choose a login name, which must not already appear in
                     13: \fI/etc/passwd\fP or \fI/usr/lib/aliases\fP.  It must also not begin with
                     14: the hyphen (``-'') character.  An account can be added by editing a line
                     15: into the passwd file; this must be done with the password file locked
                     16: e.g. by using
                     17: .IR vipw (8).
                     18: .PP
                     19: A new user is given a group and user id.
                     20: User id's should be distinct across a system, since they
                     21: are used to control access to files.
                     22: Typically, users working on
                     23: similar projects will be put in the same group.  Thus at UCB we have
                     24: groups for system staff, faculty, graduate students, and a few special
                     25: groups for large projects.  System staff is group \*(lq10\*(rq for historical
                     26: reasons, and the super-user is in this group.
                     27: .PP
                     28: A skeletal account for a new user \*(lqernie\*(rq would look like:
                     29: .IP
                     30: ernie::235:20:& Kovacs,508E,7925,6428202:/mnt/grad/ernie:/bin/csh
                     31: .PP
                     32: The first field is the login name \*(lqernie\*(rq.  The next field is the
                     33: encrypted password which is not given and must be initialized using
                     34: .IR passwd (1).
                     35: The next two fields are the user and group id's.
                     36: Traditionally, users in group 20 are graduate students and have account
                     37: names with numbers in the 200's.
                     38: The next field gives information about ernie's real name, office and office
                     39: phone and home phone.
                     40: This information is used by the
                     41: .IR finger (1)
                     42: program.
                     43: From this information we can tell that ernie's real name is
                     44: \*(lqErnie Kovacs\*(rq (the & here serves to repeat \*(lqernie\*(rq
                     45: with appropriate capitalization), that his office is 508 Evans Hall,
                     46: his extension is x2-7925, and this his home phone number is 642-8202.
                     47: You can modify the
                     48: .IR finger (1)
                     49: program if necessary to allow different information to be encoded in
                     50: this field.  The UCB version of finger knows several things particular
                     51: to Berkeley \- that phone extensions start \*(lq2\-\*(rq, that offices ending
                     52: in \*(lqE\*(rq are in Evans Hall and that offices ending in \*(lqC\*(rq are
                     53: in Cory Hall. The 
                     54: .IR chfn (1)
                     55: program allows users to change this information.
                     56: .PP
                     57: The final two fields give a login directory and a login shell name.
                     58: Traditionally, user files live on a file system different from /usr.
                     59: Typically the user file systems are mounted on a directories in the root
                     60: named sequentially starting from from the beginning of the alphabet,
                     61: eg /a, /b, /c, etc.
                     62: On each such file system there are subdirectories there for each group
                     63: of users, i.e.: \*(lq/a/staff\*(rq and \*(lq/b/prof\*(rq.
                     64: This is not strictly necessary but keeps the number of files in the
                     65: top level directories reasonably small.
                     66: .PP
                     67: The login shell will default to \*(lq/bin/sh\*(rq if none is given.
                     68: Most users at Berkeley choose \*(lq/bin/csh\*(rq so this is usually
                     69: specified here. The 
                     70: .IR chsh (1)
                     71: program allows users to change their login shell to one of the
                     72: shells in the approved list given in /etc/shells.
                     73: .PP
                     74: It is useful to give new users some help in getting started, supplying
                     75: them with a few skeletal files such as
                     76: .I \&.profile
                     77: if they use \*(lq/bin/sh\*(rq, or
                     78: .I \&.cshrc
                     79: and
                     80: .I \&.login
                     81: if they use \*(lq/bin/csh\*(rq.
                     82: The directory
                     83: \*(lq/usr/skel\*(rq contains skeletal definitions of such files.
                     84: New users should be given copies of these files which, for instance,
                     85: arrange to use
                     86: .IR tset (1)
                     87: automatically at each login.
                     88: .SH FILES
                     89: .ta 2i
                     90: /etc/passwd    password file
                     91: .br
                     92: /usr/skel      skeletal login directory
                     93: .SH SEE ALSO
                     94: passwd(1), finger(1), chsh(1), chfn(1), aliases(5), passwd(5), vipw(8)
                     95: .SH BUGS
                     96: User information should be stored in its own data base separate from
                     97: the password file.

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