How To: Create A New User

Today’s article is a nice and easy one, where you’ll learn how to create a new user. It’s a skill everyone should have and it’s really not all that difficult. It’s a pretty basic skill, after all. Either way, it shouldn’t be all that long, nor all that difficult.

In fact, I’ve previously covered some of this. Oddly, I’ve covered the more difficult stuff first. I’ve covered how to create a new user without a /home directory. I’ve also covered create a new user with sudo privileges. Oddly, I’ve never covered how to just plain create a new user. So, that’s what this article will explain.

The tool we’ll be using in this article is one you’ve used before, assuming you’ve been following the site. We’ll be using ‘adduser’ which the man page helpfully describes as:

adduser, addgroup – add a user or group to the system

As a tool, it does what it says on the tin. You can see that it’s also covering the ‘addgroup’ command. We won’t be covering that today, but it’s probably pretty obvious what it does. Hint: It is used to add groups! 

Alas, we’ll just be using the ‘adduser’ bit, in this pretty simple article to follow. Anyhow, you never know when you’ll want to create a new user and Linux is very much a multi-user operating system – even if you don’t realize it. Between users and groups, you can do some pretty fancy stuff with permissions.

Create A New User:

This article requires an open terminal, like oh so many do. To crack open a terminal, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. See? It’s magic!

Now, with your terminal open, you can create a new user with:

Next, you’ll be asked for a password. Don’t be fooled, they want your root/sudo password and not the intended password for the new user. That will come later, after the user is created. The application will tell you what it’s doing, such as creating the new user, creating the new user’s home directory, and copying the default files to the new user’s home directory.

After it’s done with that, it’ll ask you for some finishing information. You’ll be asked to type the password. That’s when you enter the password for the new user. You’ll be asked to confirm it to make sure you typed it properly. It’ll then confirm that it has set the password, ‘adduser’ is helpful like that.

At this point,  you can opt to include more information. None of this is required information and you can leave the fields blank. But, if you want, you can fill the fields for things like the new user’s real name, their phone number(s), and even what room they are in.

Given that most of my readers are home users, you’re probably not going to need to add that information. Either way, when you’re done with that you will need to confirm the information. This is obvious, but you enter Y to confirm the data, or N to go back and edit something. When you finish that, you will have a new user account that you can use immediately.

Closure:

There you have it. You now have a new article. This one will have taught you how to create a new user. As I’ve mentioned, Linux is a multi-user operating system by design and, as such, you’ll eventually need to know how to create a new user. And… When that happens… You’ll either remember – or you’ll be able to search linux-tips.us for the answer! We’ve got well over 200 articles, so we’ve covered a lot of subjects.

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Create A New User With SUDO Privileges In Ubuntu

It’s not unusual to want to create a new user with sudo privileges and it’s actually really easy. This will be just a quick article that explains how. It’s not exactly a complex operation.

This article doesn’t cover other distros! It has only been tested in a couple of Ubuntu derivatives and not all distros come with ‘adduser’. It should probably work if you install ‘adduser’ where available, but that’s entirely untested by me. Give it a shot and let me know in a comment if it works out for you.

You may want a multi-user environment, you may want different logs for different users, you may want some customization with one user, you might want to test things with a separate user, etc… There are tons of reasons for wanting a different account and wanting a new user with sudo privileges.

I shouldn’t need to mention this, but sudo stands for ‘superuser do’. Users that belong to the sudo group are pretty much omnipotent. They can access anything, change anything, and do anything they please. You’ll use sudo to do things like install software or edit system files.

Anyhow, I’ll explain how to create a new user with sudo privileges in this article. It’s a pretty easy task and you shouldn’t have much trouble with this one.

Create New User With SUDO Privileges:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

The tool we’ll be starting with is called ‘adduser‘, and the name tells you what it does. With your terminal now open, you start by entering the following to add a new user:

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be asked to type the new user’s password twice, and then you can fill in some additional information for that user. Those steps aren’t necessary, but you will want to add a password for the user – and definitely so because it’s an account that has access to sudo.

Now that you have created a new user, you’ll need to modify that user. The newly created user doesn’t come with sudo access by default, you need to grant it. The tool we’ll be using for this is ‘usermod‘ and the command to make the new account a new user with sudo privileges is:

At this point, you should be able to login and use the newly minted user account. Indeed, you should have a new user account and that new account should have sudo privileges.

CLOSURE:

See? I told you that this wouldn’t be a long or difficult article. If you want a new account and you want that account to have sudo privileges, it’s just a couple of easy commands away. This is yet another article in what’s turning out to be quite a long list of articles.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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