Suppose you have already installed the Ubuntu desktop or server. In that case, it means you have already created a default user on your system, even on the cloud also Ubuntu is installed with preconfigured default user account.

You can do all administrative tasks using this user, but sometimes you need to create another user for your team member or something else.

Here, In this ttorial, I’ll show you how to create a new user on Ubuntu Desktop or Server system.

Getting ready

You should have root or superuser privileges to create a new user on Ubuntu Server or Desktop.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to create the new user account:

To add a new user in Ubuntu, enter following command in your shell:

Enter your password to complete the command with sudo privileges:

Now enter a password for the new user:

Confirm the password for the new user:

Enter the full name and other information about the new user; you can skip this part by using the Enter key.

Enter Y to confirm that information is correct:

This should have added new user to the system. You can confirm this by viewing the file /etc/passwd:

If you want to skip the password prompt and finger information while adding the new user, use the following command:

Alternatively, you can use the useradd command as follows:

Where:

Creating a user with the command useradd does not set password for the user account. You can set or change the user password with the following command:

This will change the password for the user account bob.

With adduser, you can do five different tasks:

1. Add a normal user
2. Add a system user with system option
3. Add user group with the --group option and without the --system option
4. Add a system group when called with the --system option
5. Add an existing user to existing group when called with two non-option arguments

Creating user accounts in batch mode

In this section, you will see how to create multiple user accounts in batch mode without using any external tool.

Getting ready

You will need a user account with root or root privileges.

How to do it…

Follow these steps to create a user account in batch mode:

Create a new text file users.txt with the following command:

Change file permissions with the following command:

Open users.txt with GNU nano and add user account details:

Press Ctrl + O to save the changes.

Press Ctrl + X to exit GNU nano.

Enter $ sudo newusers users.txt to import all users listed in users.txt file.

Check /etc/passwd to confirm that users are created:

How it works…

We created a database of user details listed in same format as the passwd file. The default format for each row is as follows:

Where: