Name

useradd - add a new user to the system password file

Synopsis

# useradd [options] <login>

Description

This program adds a new user to the system.

By default, the user will be added to the users group (which has a GID of 100).

This program must be run as root.

Options

• -u, --uid uid: The user identifier for the new user. If not specified, an unused UID above 1000 will be auto-generated.
• -g, --gid gid: The group identifier for the new user. If not specified, it will default to 100 (the users group).
• -p, --password password: The encrypted password for the new user. If not specified, it will default to blank.
• -s, --shell path-to-shell: The shell binary for this login. The default is /bin/Shell.
• -m, --create-home: Create the specified home directory for this new user.
• -d, --home-dir path: Set the home directory for this user to path. By default, this is /home/username, where username is the value of login.
• -n, --gecos general-info: GECOS information about this login. See Wikipedia for more information.

Exit Values

• 0 - Success
• 1 - Couldn't update the password file
• 3 - Invalid argument to option
• 4 - UID already in use
• 12 - Couldn't create home directory

Files

• /etc/passwd - new user information (such as UID and GID) is appended to this file.
• /home/ - user home directory is created here if the -m flag is specified.

Examples

# useradd -u 300 -m kling
# useradd -m -u 400 --gid 200 --gecos "Sergey Bugaev" bugaevc
# useradd quaker
# useradd --gid 1000 -d /tmp/somedir -n "Dan MacDonald" danboid
# useradd --create-home supercomputer7