Comments on: Creating User Accounts from the Command Line

By: mallorywalker

mallorywalker — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:38:55 +0000

i have an orange mac shell.
and i’ve started with the fisrt step you gave and it just won’t work.
i have no idea of what else i can do.
please help?
thanks

By: sonofakrick

sonofakrick — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:24:06 +0000

Have you been able to successfully add users via ARD with UNIX shell scripts?

Please share as I am very interested!

Thanks.

By: rhocking

rhocking — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:04:06 +0000

Hi Kirk

Thanks for all the help. I’m curious though, what is the relationship between the
asterisk format in the password field and the command. In other words, I’ve
seen one asterisk used when creating a new user or group, but sometimes none
(still seems to work). When I use nidump passwd, Tiger shows some accounts
with no asterisk, some with one, and some with 8. I can’t seem to find any
information on the differences.

Thanks in advance
Rik

By: Marshal

Marshal — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 23:26:56 +0000

found this on Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks

for creating home directory.

% sudo ditto -rsrc \
/System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj \
/Users/rothman

% sudo chown -R rothman:staff /Users/rothman

Thank you

By: jimsoxz

jimsoxz — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:28:15 +0000

I think you have the command line wrong for taking input from a file.

Instead of sudo niload -v file.txt /

I think you meant sudo niload -v passwd /

By: chris

chris — Sat, 20 May 2006 02:53:06 +0000

Created the following shell script for the user creation process...

#!/bin/sh

# This program will create a user account and change permission properly.  

JOBPATH='/Volumes/Macintosh HD/jobs/'
clear
echo
echo
echo $JOBPATH

echo -n "Enter in the job number (no spaces):  " ; read JOB

mkdir "$JOBPATH"$JOB
sudo chmod 700 "$JOBPATH"$JOB
sudo chown $JOB "$JOBPATH"$JOB
sudo chgrp $JOB "$JOBPATH"$JOB

echo "$JOB::$JOB:$JOB::0:0:$JOB:$JOBPATH$JOB:/bin/bash" | sudo niload -v passwd /

echo
sudo passwd $JOB

Thanks for the lead!

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 17 May 2006 16:36:55 +0000

Yeah, they’ll need to log in via the GUI at least once to create the home
directory.

By: chris

chris — Tue, 16 May 2006 19:52:43 +0000

Ah…I wonder if by login, you meant via the GUI? These users will only be logging in by SSH. Just to clarify… Thanks!

By: chris

chris — Tue, 16 May 2006 19:49:53 +0000

Awesome article. Thanks! Running into one minor problem with this in Tiger. User creation goes just fine, but when they login, their directory isn’t created automatically as described, and they just get a Could not chdir to home directory /Users/212346: No such file or directory message. Any ideas?

By: Kirk

Kirk — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:52:23 +0000

You could leave blank passwords and allow users to set their passwords later.
Other than that, I don’t see any way to do it, other than to whip up something in
PHP (for a web site).

By: rkb

rkb — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 14:11:37 +0000

I’ve found your command line account creation article invaluable. I was just wondering if there was any way to set the password as the user asked, other than using the command line passwd command?

By: Kirk

Kirk — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:33:17 +0000

As mentioned in the text…

Most Unix commands are case-sensitive.

By: Bahi

Bahi — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 01:20:50 +0000

I tried this on Tiger and it worked – but only if "uid" appeared in lower case. So
"nireport . /users name uid" worked but "nireport . /users name UID" didn’t.

By: glucero

glucero — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 01:03:27 +0000

Have yet to try it but am first interested to know if it’ll work in Tiger. I need to
add a user account to many computers using the Send Unix Command in
Remote Desktop. Very cool article.

By: MartinK

MartinK — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 16:22:19 +0000

On my system (10.3.9), the command "nireport . /users name UID" will list an overview of all users, yet does not tell the user ID. For every user listed, the command reports "no value".

Everything else worked, and I’ve found the article very useful in showing how to assign specific user IDs when creating user accounts, something the GUI does not provide for. I’d guess that more than 95 percent of OS-X installations out there have a user "501" — not really my idea of the widely lauded user account separation and protection in OS-X. Assigning user accounts some higher numbered user IDs than OS-X defaults to has just enabled me to add yet another layer of security. Thank you, Kirk, for making this available as a free read!

PS: While *creating* user accounts with specific IDs is just as straightforward as described above, *changing* IDs is a totally different animal. Some part of the OS-X GUI seems to allow for that, but does only half of the job; and even on the command line, trying to change UIDs can yield very messy system states.