Defining the skeleton

If you list the contents of /home/jerry and /home/tom, you will see that they are empty:

root@ubuntu-linux:~# ls -l /home/tom 
total 0
root@ubuntu-linux:~# ls -l /home/jerry 
total 0

The reason that both /home/jerry and /home/tom are empty is that the skeleton file /etc/skel is also empty:

root@ubuntu-linux:~# ls -l /etc/skel 
total 0

WHAT IS /etc/skel?

This is the skeleton file. Any file or directory you create in /etc/skel will be copied to the home directory of any new user created.

Now, with your favorite text editor, create the file welcome.txt in /etc/skel and insert the line "Hello Friend!" in it:

root@ubuntu-linux:/etc/skel# ls 
welcome.txt
root@ubuntu-linux:/etc/skel# cat welcome.txt 
Hello Friend!

Alright, so now you have created the file welcome.txt in /etc/skel, which means that any new user created will now have the file welcome.txt in their home directory. To demonstrate, let's create a new user named edward and then we will take a peek at...