how to add bulk of users in fedora 10

asifbasha · 08-17-2009, 07:03 AM

hai to all
i suppose to add a bulk of users in my linux system and i am the root user,i have tried the useradd command it prompts for a password for each user.Each and every time typping the new password and verifying that new password for new user makes me difficult ,what i thought is that i want to fetch username and password form text file or bash script to create all users with out giving input to command line such as passwd command ...is this possible for me by using a bash script , and if i execute that bash script ./scriptname all users have to be created ,is that possible ? if so please help me ..

thanks in advance

theNbomr · 08-17-2009, 09:07 AM

In most cases, the passwd command and it's ilk do not read from stdin to read passwords, which makes your approach difficult or impossible. If your user database already exists on one or more other hosts, you can simply copy & paste to the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files.

--- rod.

slimm609 · 08-17-2009, 03:55 PM

just a quick and dirty script to do that for you.
Check and make sure that passwd accepts the --stdin option. (RHEL4,5 does). Dont have a F11 box built right now to test.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

USERFILE=/root/user.list

cat $USERFILE | while read line ; do
  USER=`echo $line | awk '{ print $1 }'`
  PASS=`echo $line | awk '{ print $2 }'`
  useradd -d /home/$USER $USER
  echo "$PASS" | passwd --stdin $USER
done

the file should contain

user1 password1
user2 password2
user3 password3

rfelsburg · 08-18-2009, 08:09 PM

You can just easily use perl's crypt command to hash the password, and then useradd's -p option to specify the password. Depends on which you're more comfortable with.

-Rob