Adding new users is something that you will need to do if you want to allow other users to use your machine.<\/p>\n
To add a new user is simple enough. First of all you need to become root, you can do this by logging in with your normal user account then running the <\/p>\n
su<\/pre>\ncommand.<\/p>\n
Once you are root you can add a new user with the adduser<\/tt> command<\/strong>, this needs a single parameter – the name of the account to add.<\/p>\n
If you want to give the user ‘John Smith’ a login account you could run<\/p>\n
useradd jsmith <\/pre>\nOnce this is done there are two more things you need to do – set the password for this account (they can change it themselves later) – you can do this by running<\/p>\n
passwd jsmith<\/pre>\nWhen you run passwd it will ask you for the password to set twice, to make sure you’ve typed what you think you’ve typed.<\/p>\n
The next thing you need to do is make a home directory for them. This will normally just involve running:<\/p>\n
mkdir \/home\/jsmith\r\nchown jsmith:users \/home\/jsmith<\/pre>\nThis creates a directory with the same name as the login account beneath the <\/p>\n
\/home<\/pre>\ndirectory – then changes it to be owned by the user.<\/p>\n
If you omit the ‘<\/p>\n
chown<\/pre>\n<\/strong>‘ command the user will not have permission to save files inside their own home directory !<\/p>\n
Now let us test :<\/strong><\/p>\n
Syntax<\/strong><\/p>\n
A simplified expression of the syntax of the su command is:<\/p>\n
su [options] [commands] [-] [username]<\/pre>\nThe square brackets indicate that the enclosed item is optional. Thus, the simplest way to use the su command is to just type:<\/p>\n
su<\/pre>\nThe operating system assumes that, in the absence of a username, the user wants to change to a root session, and thus the user is prompted for the root password as soon as the ENTER key is pressed. This produces the same result as typing:<\/p>\n
su root<\/pre>\nIf the correct password is provided, ownership of the session is changed to root.<\/p>\n
Likewise, to transfer the ownership of a session to any other user, the name of that user is typed after su and a space. For example, to change the owner of the current login session to a user named alice<\/em>, type the following:<\/p>\n
su jsmith<\/pre>\nThe user will then be prompted for the password of the account with the username John Smith.<\/p>\n
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