Lesson 7 Manage Users

This week we take a look at managing those pesky users. Sure, using openSUSE we can use YaST, the GUI tool. We will look at this but we want to concentrate on the command line so we are distribution agnostic and you are truly learning Linux.

The first port of call from the command line will be the file /etc/default/useradd. This controls the default settings for users and we should edit the umask to 077. The umask value we looked at in the last lesson, lesson 6.

Then using useradd and passwd we can create users and set their passwords. The command line will also allow us to create many users at the same time, we look at a simple for loop to do this, so we make an early start with scripting.