hello folks, you have a real newbie on your hands here. I recently opened a dedicated redhatlinux 7.2, W apache server to host websites for artists in my community, Ive had a few bumps getting started. I am tring to set up mail for a new user, and have discovered that there doesn't appear to be binbash logout profile rc cs emacs or screenrc files in their home directory. - BUT there are these files in another users directory, but they are for an id that I used in an earlier attempt to set up the new user.

so user 502 has "binbash,logout,profile" et all files in a home directory that is document root for my web page. but user 503 doesnt seem to have these files anywhere.

Im assuiming this is a real mess - and want to clean it up before i add a new user. I have root, but was wondering if I could create a new user for the id 502 (in my webmin user list no 502 user is listed) and then somehow re-create those files for user 503 in their home directory.

look at /etc/skel
skeleton dir for new users
and create there the files for all your new users

well - i dont know exactly how i did it but i restored the correct users to the corect home directories, and this time i didnt crash the server.

Im using webmin - so i just created a new user with a uid of 502 in the correct home directory it seemed to overwrite the files.

I looked in /etc/skel and the files that were there appeared only to be sample files?

can anyone tell me what the bin bash logout ... files actually do?

Ive scouraged the net and am a bit vague still on their functions.