Keywords: sag

Next: What's an account? Up: Linux System Administrators' Guide Previous: Shell startup

# Managing user accounts

The similarities of sysadmins and drug dealers:
both measure stuff in K's, and both have users.
(Old, tired computer joke.)

This chapter explains how to create new user accounts, how to modify the properties of those accounts, and how to remove the accounts. Different Linux systems have different tools for doing this.

- What's an account?
- Creating a user
  - `/etc/passwd` and other informative files
  - Picking numeric user and group ids
  - Initial environment: `/etc/skel`
  - Creating a user by hand
- Changing user properties
- Removing a user
- Disabling a user temporarily