Subject: Re: "adduser" proposal
To: Chris Jones <cjones@rupert.honors.montana.edu>
From: Jukka Marin <jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi>
List: current-users
Date: 10/16/1998 19:20:30
On Fri, Oct 16, 1998 at 09:55:50AM -0600, Chris Jones wrote:
> I think it'd be great to have a native NetBSD adduser.  But I can see
> that providing sufficient flexibility is going to be a problem, no
> matter what you do.  It would be really neat (IMHO) to have something
> akin to an /etc/adduser.conf file, which would specify default values
> for the local system.  It would also be cool to have something like an
> /etc/adduser.local script that would be run by adduser.  That would
> allow the admin to customize as much as desired.

I have written a command which can
- create new accounts
- delete accounts
- modify parameters of an existing account

This command has options to run a script before and after the real
operation, so it is possible to first create a new account and then
automatically (using a script) create the user's home directory
and copy some config files into it, set up quotas etc.  Likewise,
it is possible to first delete user's files and home and then
remove the account (using only one command).

It is also possible to move a user into a different group with one
command.. or extend the account expire date by a given number of
days using only one command.

This command (called amuser) is not perfect and I hope to find some
time to work on it again, but it is being used by an automatic
account manipulator on a NetBSD machine with well over 3000 users.

  -jm