Managing user accounts

So far, we've used two user accounts throughout the previous chapters; a standard user and the root user. In Linux, we can create a user account via a GUI utility or via the command line. In the shell, we use the useradd command in order to create a new user account. In newer distributions, there is also the adduser command. In some distributions, such as CentOS, adduser is a symbolic link. This can be seen here:

[root@localhost philip]# ll /usr/sbin/adduser
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 7 Jun 20 09:19 /usr/sbin/adduser -> useradd
[root@localhost philip]#

On Ubuntu, the adduser command is separate from the useradd command:

root@ubuntu:/home/philip# ll /usr/sbin/adduser
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 37276 Jul  2  2015 /usr/sbin/adduser*
root@ubuntu:/home/philip#

The basic syntax when using the useradd command is useradd <option> username. By default, a standard...