Managing users
Managing users, as with most administrative tasks, can be done
through interaction with a graphical user interface such as the
Kuser tool supplied with KDE or, if you prefer, through a terminal
window.
Kuser will do most of the tasks described below. It is designed
to allow you to act as an administrator to the users or groups of
users that have access to your Linux system; this includes the
tasks of creating, disabling and removing users from the
system.
The command line tools that provide the same functionality
through a terminal window can be found in the /bin
directory in the Linux installation. The command for creating a new
user is adduser and can be run by typing the command
/bin/adduser in a terminal window. Note that the
adduser command is sometimes different for different
installations; try the command useradd as the first
alternative. This command should be disabled to all users but
root.
Users can be disabled by editing the /etc/passwd
file. This file contains a list of user names and their associated
passwords (stored in an encrypted form for security reasons). To
disable a user, replace their encrypted password with the
* (asterisk) character; this change will make it
impossible for the user to sign on. Again, you will only be able to
do this as the root user.
If you want to completely remove a user from the system then you
should use the command userdel. This command can only
be run by root users and comes with a variety of command line
options (type man userdel for details). If the
-r flag is added to this command then this will not
only remove the user's name from the password file, but will also
remove their home directory.
|