6. User Management Tools

Most enterprise environments are using management systems to manage users, accounts and passwords. However, on a single machine computer there are useful commands to run to manage users.

Adding Users

You can use the adduser or the useradd command. The adduser command contains more helpful features such as making a home directory and more. There are configuration files for adding new users that can be customized depending on what you want to allocate to a default user.

$ sudo useradd bob

You'll see that the above command creates an entry in /etc/passwd for bob, sets up default groups and adds an entry to the /etc/shadow file.

Removing Users

To remove a user, you can use the userdel command.

$ sudo userdel bob

This basically does its best to undo the file changes by useradd.

Changing Passwords

$ passwd bob

This will allow you to change the password of yourself or another user (if you are root).