Changing home folder for users

Question

I have a question regarding changing the home folder for a user on the system. I was thinking I could do something like:

new_folder_name="$2"
user_name="$3"
mkdir /home/$new_folder_name
usermod -d -m /home/$new_folder_name/$user_name

This unfortunately did not work and now I feel kinda lost. Anyone have some advice on how to do this?

I used mkdir /home/$2 chown $3:$3 /home/$2 chmod 700 /home/$2 usermod --home /home/$2 $3 instead, which works, but it prints chown: invalid group:username:username afterwards, why is that?

Answer 1

At first you must create path /home/$2/$3. You may execute, for example, mkdir -p /home/$2/$3 Then you need run chmod username:username /home/$2/$3 After that you may run usermod -d -m /home/$2/$3 I think is nessessery to run chown 750 /home/$2/$3

Answer 2

It looks like you missed a space in usermod, you should also quote your variables. You will also have to move the data (probably instead of creating the empty directory).

Answer 3

There is a syntax error in usermod

Try as

usermod -d /home/$new_folder_name -m $user_name