Creating user account & pasting files in Desktop remotely?

Question

I need to create a seperate user account in all the systems. And i have to paste few files in their desktop. I have created a seperate useraccount with password remotely. However when i type ls /home/username only examples.desktop file is shown there. There is no Desktop, Music, Videos, Documents Folder etc etc. I know after logging in to that account physically the system creates folder for new users automatically. But is there any other way to acheive this task? Coz i need to create user account for more than 200 systems.

Update:

• Clear solution will get bounty.

Update 1:

• Accessing the system via SSH.
• Yes the user account must have a password.

Answer 1

Consider this an answer-in-progress, since more details are necessary on how you are adding users, whether it's the same username, etc.

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Assuming you are creating a user with the same name and the same Desktop contents on each of the 200 systems, you need to do the following:

1. Pack the custom "Desktop" contents into a tarball, and upload it somewhere. Example:

   • Suppose the Desktop folder and other custom home contents are in /home/karthick/custom-folders
   • Archive with cd ~/custom-folders && tar -cvzf ../customfiles.tar.gz .
   • Upload customfiles.tar.gz to e.g. some HTTP server, say http://personal.karthick.com/

2. Here's the outline of the script to run on the target system to create the user with the custom folder:

   sudo useradd --create-home customuser
   cd /home/customuser
   wget -O- http://personal.karthick.com/customfiles.tar.gz | tar -xz
   sudo chown -R customuser:customuser *
   

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More information that would be helpful to improve the answer:

• Are you setting a password for this user? Will it be the same user?
• How are you accessing the remote systems - SSH?

Answer 2

Which version of Ubuntu are you using? In any case, upon creation of a user account, the contents of /etc/skel/ are copied to the user's new directory. I the usual user folders are not in /etc/skel they will not be in the new user directories either.

In that case, you might want to write a script that creates the user you need and then the folders inside their directory. It seems easier to me, rather than editing the contents of /etc/skel in 200 systems.