7.5. Adding users with useradd

Each system’s useradd implements the same basic procedure outlined above. However, it is configurable, and you will probably want to customize it to fit your environment. Since each system has its own idea of what you should customize, where you should implement the customizations, and what the default behavior should be, we cover these details in vendor-specific sections.

Table 7.4 is a handy summary of commands and configuration files related to managing users. Each of our example systems has a suite of commands for manipulating users, usually at least useradd, usermod, and userdel. Since the commands are all configured similarly, we show useradd as representative of all three and supplement its entry with other system-specific commands.