User creation script

[Jacques B.]

On 4/25/07, Ashley M. Kirchner <ashley at pcraft.com> wrote:
>
>     Anyone have pointers (or examples) of a script that can be used to
> create new users and set their password at the same time?  I need
> something I can call like so:
>
>     script USERNAME PASSWORD
>
>     ...and have it return 1 or 0 for failure or success.
>
>     This is going to be used by another application with the arguments
> USERNAME and PASSWORD passed to it.  And this will also be running
> through sudo (from some protected area.)
>
>
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Here is one I did up to create a bunch of accounts when running a
class. It creates user1, user2, user3, user4, etc.. with corresponding
password being the same as the username.

for (( i=1; i<21; i++)); do /usr/sbin/useradd user$i && echo "user$i"
| passwd --stdin user$i || echo "unable to add user$i"; done

I have this in a script but it is written such that you can do it at
the command line.  You could clean it up to behave a bit more like you
want it. I have a second script as follows to remove the accounts and
their home directory when done:

for (( i=1; i<21; i++)); do /usr/sbin/userdel -r user$i; done

and of course you could change the for loop counter to suite your needs.

If you want to use a list of names from a file (each entry separated
by a space or newline) you could write the script as follows:

for i in $(cat users); do /usr/sbin/adduser $i && echo "$i" | passwd
--stdin $i;done

Where users is the text file containing the list of users you want to add.

Or you could simply supply the names on the command line as follows:

for i in john mary paul; do /usr/sbin/useradd $i && echo "$i" | passwd
--stdin $i;done

In both these examples the password is the same as the username.  If
you wanted to assign a password from a file along with the username,
then you could either incorporate the hash command from perl (not
comfortable enough to help you on that without some digging), or
create a file with usernames (called users.txt in this script) and a
second with passwords (called pass.txt i this script and it associates
first username in users.txt to first password in pass.txt, etc) and
use the following script:

declare -ar USERNAMES=($(cat users.txt))
declare -ar PASSWORDS=($(cat pass.txt))
declare -ir NUM_OF_USERS=${#usernames[@]}

for (( i=0; i<$NUM_OF_USERS; i++ ));do  /usr/sbin/useradd
${USERNAMES[$i]} && echo "${PASSWORDS[$i]}" | passwd --stdin
${USERNAMES[$i]} && echo Successfully added user ${USERNAMES[$i]} ||
echo "unable to add ${USERNAMES[$i]}"; done



There are other ways you could do this (use one file with username,
password on each line and then parse out each line).

I tried to keep it as simple as possible (both because I don't have
time to code a more complex script right now and it's not that bad an
idea to keep usernames and passwords separate - if you wanted more
security you could convert the passwords to their proper crypted
values and put that in a file and then have the script use those
values instead, possibly inserting them into the shadow file via the
script. Of course I'm assuming you would assign a default password for
each user which you would require them to change anyhow.

Hope this helps.

Jacques B