Locking down users' home directories the Debian/Ubuntu way

Debian and its offspring, such as Ubuntu, have two user creation utilities:

• useradd
• adduser

Let's have a look at both of them.

useradd on Debian/Ubuntu

The useradd utility is there, but Debian and Ubuntu don't come with the handy preconfigured defaults as Red Hat and CentOS do. If you were to just do sudo useradd frank on a default Debian/Ubuntu machine, Frank would have no home directory and would be assigned the wrong default shell. So, to create a user account with useradd on a Debian or Ubuntu system, the command would look something like this:

sudo useradd -m -d /home/frank -s /bin/bash frank

In this command, we have the following:

• -m creates...