I'm basically asking about user management from the command line (e.g. on a system where there are no graphical tools available). In the past I've used several different programs to add or delete users and groups or to modify their attributes: adduser
, useradd
, usermod
, gpasswd
, and perhaps others I've forgotten. I've also heard a couple times that some of these programs are low-level and should be avoided for general use, but I can never remember which. So I'd like to get a definitive answer for which programs are the recommended ones for at least the following tasks:
- Create a new user
- Add a user to a group
- Remove a user from a group
- Change a user's primary group
- Change a user's login shell or home directory
- Delete a user
I'm looking for standard tools which I can expect to be available on pretty much any Linux system (of any distribution).
groupmod
. I'm not going to make this an answer.... but the most standard way is probably to use your text editor... remember the files affected are just delimited text./etc/passwd
was just one part of a complex system)