[CentOS] adduser vs. useradd

[Thomas Iverson]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 3:28 PM, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> To add a user to the system on the commandline, I usually use the adduser
> command.
>
> # adduser newuser
>
> And that's it. I've been using that command probably out of an old habit,
> since I've been a long-time Slackware user before. But now I wanted to dig a
> bit deeper, and some details puzzle me.
>
> Whereas on Slackware, 'adduser' is an interactive shell script to create a
> user so that basically you don't have to memorize all the 'useradd'
> switches, CentOS' 'adduser' is a mere symbolic link to 'useradd'.
>
> But when I add a new user (# adduser newuser), I don't use any switches, say
> to specify the shell, the home directory, the password expiration delay,
> etcetera. I understand that it is Red Hat (CentOS) tradition to create a
> separate group for each user. For example, user kikinovak also belongs to a
> group kikinovak. And when I create a new user 'newuser', the 'newuser' group
> also got somehow created. Plus, the new user also seems to have his own user
> profile, with a default .bashrc and so on. My only explanation for that is
> that CentOS' 'useradd' command doesn't work like the traditional UNIX
> useradd command and uses a few switches by default. Please correct me if I'm
> wrong.
>
> Any light on this?
>
> Niki
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>

Hi there , you are almost right
adduser is only a symbol-link of the useradd in CentOS , for my
explanation , it may be security-related
you know , to use useradd , you can also specify the home dir,group
and so on , but script codes have danger
adduser under some distros such as archlinux,slackware is a
bash-script , so if you think it's more convenient to use a
user-friendly adduser written in bash , you can do it yourself , but
before that you should know exactly how to create a new user without
useradd-like utilities

Cheers

-- 
Keep It Simple Stupid
Thomas X. Iverson