Sun Microsystems Sun Workstation 100U System Manager's Manual page 162

ADDUSER(8)
MAINTENANCE
CO~NDS
ADDUSER(8)
NAME
add user - procedure for adding new users
DESCRIPTION
FILES
A new user must choose a login narne, which must not already appear in
/etc/po88Wd. An account
can be added by editing a line into the passwd file; this must be done with the password file
locked, for example, by using
vipw(8).
A new user is given a group and user ide User id's should be distinct across a system, since they
are used to control access to files. Typically, users working on similar projects will be put in the
same group. System staff is group '10' for historical reasons, and the super-user is in this group.
A skeletal account for a new user 'esmerelda' would look like:
esmereldaaa235a20a & Featherstonehaugh a /usr/esmereldaa /bin/csh
Fields in the password file have the following meanings:
1. Login name ('esmerelda').
2. Encrypted password. Set the user's password with
posswd(l).
3. User ID.
4. Group ID.
5. This field is called the 'GeOS' field (from earlier implementation of UNIX) and is traditionally
used to hold the user's full name. Some installations have other information encoded in this
field. From this information we can tell that esmerelda's real name is 'Esmerelda Feather-
stonehaugh'. The & here is a shorthand for the user's login name.
6. User's home directory.
7. Initial shell which this user will see on login. If this field is empty, sh(l) is used as the initial
shell.
It is userul to give new users some help in getting started, supplying them with a rew skeletal files
such as
.profile if they use' /bin/sh', or .cshrc and .login ir they use '/bin/csh'. New users should
be given copies or these files which, ror instance, arrange to use
tset(l) automatically at each
login.
/etc/passwd
password file
SEE ALSO
passwd(l), chsh(l), passwd(5), vipw(8)
Sun Release 1.1 Last change: 6 March 1984
7