@tom23

Instead of adduser you can use useradd which will add both the user and the group at the same time (thus reducing the number of commands you need to run).

In the example you’ve referenced, they are telling you to run the first command to add a user to the system. The second command adds a group named admin. The third command adds the user you created in the first command to the group you created in the second command. That’s the most basic way to explain it :-).

You can, however, do the exact same thing by running:

useradd -d /path/to/home username

Explanation:

useradd

A command to add users to the server/system.

-d

Allows you to specify the users home directory. As an example, if you’d like for a users home to be set to /home/username/htdocs, you’d pass -d /home/username/htdocs.

username

Is simply any username that you’d like to add :-). It could be newuser, myuser, gandolf etc. As long as the username doesn’t already exist on the system, you can add it.

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So if we wanted to create a new user, gandolf, as an example, we could run:

useradd -d /home/gandolf/htdocs gandolf

This will:

1). Create a new user with the username gandolf
2). Create a new group with the group name gandolf
3). If the directory does not exist already, create a new directory /home/gandolf/htdocs

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Now, this user is not able to login just yet because he doesn’t have a password, so we need to issue one using passwd.

passwd gandolf

You’ll now be prompted to set a password and once you hit enter, asked to reconfirm by entering the same password again. Keep in mind, whatever you type in when asked to set and confirm the password will be invisible (i.e. you won’t be able to see what you’re typing), so make sure you key in carefully.

That said, if you mess it up, you can always run the same command again to change it.