Hello I am using ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. Logging in as root:
I am unable to use the useradd command with the -p switch to set a password for that user all in one line.
IE
adduser bob -p password

Am I using the wrong syntax???

Any help would be greatly appreciated

The -p option is for adding the encrypted password. You want to use the "passwd" program to create a password after the "useradd" command.

Hi,
So are you saying. If the user was bob and his password would be tree:
it would be
useradd bob|passwd tree

Thanks I got it now


Thanks very much

No, run it in a separate command.
useradd bob <other options>
passwd bob
<passwd>

Another option would be to calculate the encrypted password and feed that into the command, but I don't know if that would work. The useradd command expects a "crypt" encrypted password. Your system might use bluefish or md5 instead. I don't know if you could use one of the ssl programs instead to produce the encryption. Also, the entry in /etc/shadow may contain a salt prefix.

useradd -p <(encryption_program options tree) username

Another thing you could do is use expect to input the password entry if using a script.

You might have luck looking in an Ubuntu wiki.