I am running Sarge, and this is the first time I have tried to add new users.

I did:

useradd -m fred

and fred was created for me. I could then su - fred from root and it changed straight to fred without asking me for a password. When I tried to set a password by just typing "passwd" as fred I was asked for the current password, which I didn't have, so now the only way I can be fred is to su from root.

I then tried:

useradd -m -p bob bob

and the same thing happened. So now I need to know what I did wrong and how to fix bob and fred so they can login as themselves, because according to the useradd man page, I don't know where I went wrong.

Cheers,
Jude.

Firstly - don't su.

CTRL-D back out to a login - and login as fred to change the passwd, or, as root:

passwd fred

This should allow you to change it.

If that doesn't work - hand edit /etc/shadow, and remove everything in between the first pair of colons on the line that begins with fred.

Thanks. passwd fred as root did the trick.

Is there a way to avoid that in the future and and to be able to successfully set a password with useradd?

useradd -p password username

Thanks for your help.