Hey all

Im trying to add a user with the useradd command.
I open a terminal and log in and do the following

[thomas@localhost thomas]$ su
Password:
[root@localhost thomas]# useradd tom
bash: useradd: command not found

what silly thing em I doing wrong?

Try "adduser". Also, what disto are you running?
Noah.

You could try
locate useradd or
which useradd
like so:
And then try running it with the full path
/usr/sbin/useradd

BTW, what distro are you using? That might help.

Later

I was able to get the command to work by locating it and running it from its directory.
how do i find what distro im running?

thanks again for the help !!

Hey,

This will tell you a lot about your system
uname -a

However, as for distro....well what one did you install? When you start up the computer it will usually tell you. By distro we are refereing to Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian...etc. To find out what you are running you can try

for some reason I have both a redhat one and a mandrake one. This isn't fool-proof. Because this file could easily changed but I doubt anyone would do that

Hope this helps.

Later

OK, the reason it didn't work is because useradd is only in the path for root and just doing 'su' does not change the environment variables, only the user. To be root with all root's environment set up you need to type:Notice the hyphen after su.

actually you can just use su to become root....at least on my system

You didn't read what I wrote - su WITHOUT the hyphen will make you root, but it will not load root's environment (most importantly it won't give you root's PATH, just the normal user's path)

WITH the hyphen it gives you root's environment settings - his PATH, any other environment variables like DISPLAY that root might have set. Most importantly it puts /sbin in the path which it isn't usually for a normal user.

Obviously this all depends on what PATH you set for different users - if they have the same path as the root then nothing much will change apart from what you can load and change.

Read the su man page.

sorry...didn't read you post carefully...just skimmed it. I guess my wife it correct when she says I don't listen =p

Later

Thanks all everything works great!!!!!

The problem is when you type "su" you are not updating the environment variables.

You need to type "su -" to update this information, then your root user commands wills work.

Hope this helps!

-Swindled

the "-" is only the short version for "-l" who gives you a real login shell.

If you do not use the "-" or "-l" option, you only change the user without getting a new login shell.