How to script the creation of a new user?

[Member Keeely]

I have created a new user on the live system of Core, using the following command:

useradd -m -g users bob -s /bin/bash

However after running the cli-installer I end up with these permissions on that /home directory:

# ls -l /home
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 4 1000 1000 4096 May  6 05:29 bob

But I would expect to see:

drwxr-xr-x 4 bob users 4096 May  6 05:29 bob

After I manually correct that with:

chown -R bob:users /home/bob

ssh then starts working correctly.

Just wondering am I creating the user wrong?

thanks!

[Member Xecure]

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Did you try?
sudo useradd -m -g users -s /bin/bash bob
If I am not mistaken, useradd has this structure
useradd [OPTIONS] username
So the username needs to go at the end.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Anonymous]

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Just wondering am I creating the user wrong is there a better way?

The “adduser” command is usually preferable over useradd,
and “adduser bob” (without typing further commandline options) should yield a desirable result.

For more info, you can “man login.defs” and “man adduser” and “sudo cat /etc/login.defs”

$ sudo adduser spooky3
Adding user 'spooky3' ...
Adding new group 'spooky3' (1003) ...
Adding new user 'spooky3' (1003) with group 'spooky3' ...
Creating home directory '/home/spooky3' ...
Copying files from '/etc/skel' ...
New password: 
Retype new password: 
passwd: password updated successfully
Changing the user information for spooky3
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
	Full Name []: 
	Room Number []: 
	Work Phone []: 
	Home Phone []: 
	Other []: 
Is the information correct? [Y/n] 
Adding new user 'spooky3' to extra groups ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'dialout' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'dip' ...
adduser: The group 'fuse' does not exist.
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'cdrom' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'audio' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'video' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'plugdev' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'users' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'floppy' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'netdev' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'scanner' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'lp' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'lpadmin' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'sudo' ...
Adding user 'spooky3' to group 'vboxsf' ...

[Member Keeely]

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I think the operations with the demo account in cli-installer could interfere with the created account somehow, because everything is fine in the live system, but it gets messed up after the install (under /media), and those demo account operations are the only time groups and users are touched as part of the installer. That’s just a theory, I don’t have proof, but there’s some stuff in that area of cli-installer that looks a little iffy.

I decided to try to add the default user as part of cli-installer instead of doing it independently before running cli-install. (make that my main account, but not auto-login). Then everything works OK. There is one small problem with this approach if you are automating cli-installer. An answerfile works perfectly OK when you set the root password (primary account as root), but when you set the primary account to be something else, it didn’t work.

I needed to write a proper expect script when I include that extra part of cli-installer in the flow, it’s as if the password setting for non-root user uses the tty in a different way to just setting the root pw, and it goes completely nuts spewing out password errors with simple answerfile piped to stdin.

Anyways, it’s all fixed now, and I only need one account so setting it up in cli-installer works OK for me.

In case this is useful for anyone else, full script is:

/usr/bin/expect << ENDOFCLIINSTALLERSCRIPT
spawn cli-installer
expect "Do you want to repartition the disk (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Root partition (hda1, sda2, etc): "
send "sda1\n"
expect "Do you want to continue (No will abort the installation) (n/Y)? "
send "y\n"
expect "Do you want to use a separate '/home' partition (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Are you running antiX-net (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Do you want to install some packages via cli-aptiX (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Do you want to continue (No will abort the install) (n/Y)? "
send "y\n"
expect "This may take some time."
set timeout 120
expect "Install GRUB on MBR (Y/n) No will install to root partition? "
send "y\n"
set timeout 30
expect "Computer name (default is 'antix1')? "
send "\n"
expect "Do you want to set up system localisation (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Do you want to set up keyboard (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Do you want to set up console layout (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Do you want to set up system timezone (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Do you want to enable/disable startup services (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Is this a remastered/snapshot install (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Type in your default user name: "
send "bob\n"
expect "New password: "
send "bob1\n"
expect "Retype new password: "
send "bob1\n"
expect -ex {Full Name []: }
send "\n"
expect -ex {Room Number []: }
send "\n"
expect -ex {Work Phone []: }
send "\n"
expect -ex {Home Phone []: }
send "\n"
expect -ex {Other []: }
send "\n"
expect -ex {Is the information correct? [Y/n] }
send "y\n"
expect "New password: "
send "bob1\n"
expect "Retype new password: "
send "bob1\n"
expect "Set autologin for bob: (y/N)? "
send "n\n"
expect "Cleaning up"
expect eof
ENDOFCLIINSTALLERSCRIPT

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