Adding users

Before you can add a user on your system, you have to become root:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ su - 
Password:
root@ubuntu-linux:~#

Now, we are ready to add users. We all love Tom & Jerry, so let's begin by adding user tom. To do that, you need to run the command useradd -m tom:

root@ubuntu-linux:~# useradd -m tom

And just like that, the user tom is now added to our system. You will also see a new line added to the end of the /etc/passwd file for the new user tom; let's view it with the lovely tail command:

root@ubuntu-linux:~# tail -n 1 /etc/passwd 
tom:x:1007:1007::/home/tom:/bin/sh

We used the -m option with the useradd command to ensure that a new home directory will be created for user tom. So let's try to change to the /home/tom directory to make sure it's indeed created:

root@ubuntu-linux:~# cd /home/tom 
root@ubuntu-linux:/home/tom# pwd
/home/tom

Awesome! We verified that /home/tom is created.

The first thing you may want to do after creating a new...