adding_user(8)

NAME

adding_user - procedure for adding new users

A new user must choose a login name, which must not already
appear in /etc/passwd or /etc/mail/aliases. It must also not begin
with the hyphen `-' character. It is strongly recommended that it be all
lower-case, and not contain the dot `.' character, as that tends to confuse
mailers. An account can be added by editing a line into the passwd file;
this must be done with the password file locked e.g. by using chpass(1)
or vipw(8).
A new user is given a group and user id. Login and user
id's should be unique across the system, and often across a group of sys
tems, since they are used to control file access. Typically, users working
on similar projects will be put in the same groups. At the University
of California, Berkeley, we have groups for system staff, faculty,
graduate students, and special groups for large projects.
A skeletal account for a new user ``ernie'' might look like:
ernie::25:30::0:0:Ernie Kovacs,508 Evans Hall,x7925,: 642-8202:/a/users/ernie:/bin/csh
For a description of each of these fields, see passwd(5).
It is useful to give new users some help in getting started,
supplying them with a few skeletal files such as .profile if they use
/bin/sh, or .cshrc and .login if they use /bin/csh. The directory
/usr/share/skel contains skeletal definitions of such files. New users
should be given copies of these files which, for instance, use tset(1) auto
matically at each login.

/etc/master.passwd user database
/usr/share/skel skeletal login directory

The adding_user utility appeared in 3.0BSD.