Red Hat Knowledgebase

To create users, one can use useradd command or the GUI tool, redhat-config-users. However, its a bit tedious to use if you have many users to create. You have the option of importing a file with the newusers utility.

The format of the file is the same as the contents of the /etc/passwd file. An example is shown below:

 
visitor:password:501:501::/home/visitor:/bin/bash
redhat:password:520:520:Red Hat Dummy User:/home/redhat:/bin/nologin
nisuser1:password:522:522:Nis User:/nishome/nisuser1:/bin/bash
training:password:523:523:Training Account:/home/training:/bin/bash
      

The file contains cleartext passwords that will be encrypted to MD5 once imported. It can be imported with the newusers command, with the syntax shown below:

 
newusers <filename>