Here's the script code I'm using now:
getent group $MYGROUP
if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
sudo su -c "groupadd $MYGROUP"
fi
sudo su -c "useradd mynewuser -p mypassword -m -g $PRIMARYGRP -G $MYGROUP"
This approach works well on openSuse. But there are several problems with the user account it creates on Ubuntu so I am seeking help here.
- the terminal prompt isn't set (
echo $PS1
returns nothing) - the arrow keys and tab key do not work correctly in the terminal
- the password doesn't seem to work (although I'm still unclear exactly what this issue is)
- the /etc/sudoers rights set for this new user are not honored
If instead I manually create the user with adduser
(instead of useradd) I don't have these problems on Ubuntu. But I can't use adduser
on openSuse (afaik). Therefore, I need a non-Debian-exclusive script or method of adding user accounts via my bash script that works on Ubuntu (and doesn't stop working on other distros).
Finally, I would like to understand the differences between adduser
and useradd
. For example, I want to know which skeleton directory is used by adduser
as that might be the reason useradd
isn't working as expected (because I just accepted the default).
Thanks
man useradd
): useradd is a low level utility for adding users. On Debian, administrators should usually use adduser(8) instead.sudo su -c "cmd arg1 arg2"
is equivalent tosudo cmd arg1 arg2
.sudo su -c "cmd arg1 arg2"
so that it works everywhere I need it to work.adduser
is a perl script more than 1000 lines long, so for the differences you can take a look at the script.adduser
but I don't know perl. So that's not a good approach for me.