Creating a user account

You will need super user or root privileges to add a new user to the Ubuntu server.

Follow these steps to create the new user account:

In Linux systems, the adduser command is higher level command to quickly add a new user to the system. Since adduser requires root privileges, we need to use sudo along with the command, adduser completes following operations:

If you want to skip the password prompt and finger information while adding the new user, use the following command:

$ sudo adduser --disabled-password --gecos "" username

Alternatively, you can use the useradd command as follows:

$ sudo useradd -s <SHELL> -m -d <HomeDir> -g <Group> UserName

Where:

Creating a user with the command useradd does not set password for the user account. You can set or change the user password with the following command:

$sudo passwd bob

This will change the password for the user account bob.

With adduser, you can do five different tasks:

Check out the manual page man adduser to get more details.

You can also configure various default settings for the adduser command. A configuration file /etc/adduser.conf can be used to set the default values to be used by the adduser, addgroup, and deluser commands. A key value pair of configuration can set various default values, including the home directory location, directory structure skel to be used, default groups for new users, and so on. Check the manual page for more details on adduser.conf with following command:

$ man adduser.conf