How to automatically add user account AND password with a Bash script?

Question

I need to have the ability to create user accounts on my Linux (Fedora 10) and automatically assign a password via a bash script(or otherwise, if need be).

It\'s eas

Answer 1

For RedHat / CentOS here's the code that creates a user, adds the passwords and makes the user a sudoer:

#!/bin/sh
echo -n "Enter username: "
read uname

echo -n "Enter password: "
read -s passwd

adduser "$uname"
echo $uname:$passwd | sudo chpasswd

gpasswd wheel -a $uname

Answer 2

--stdin doesn't work on Debian. It says:

`passwd: unrecognized option '--stdin'`

This worked for me:

#useradd $USER
#echo "$USER:$SENHA" | chpasswd

Here we can find some other good ways:

• http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/668

Answer 3

The code below worked in Ubuntu 14.04. Try before you use it in other versions/linux variants.

# quietly add a user without password
adduser --quiet --disabled-password --shell /bin/bash --home /home/newuser --gecos "User" newuser

# set password
echo "newuser:newpassword" | chpasswd

Answer 4

I liked Tralemonkey's approach of echo thePassword | passwd theUsername --stdin though it didn't quite work for me as written. This however worked for me.

echo -e "$password\n$password\n" | sudo passwd $user

-e is to recognize \n as new line.

sudo is root access for Ubuntu.

The double quotes are to recognize $ and expand the variables.

The above command passes the password and a new line, two times, to passwd, which is what passwd requires.

If not using variables, I think this probably works.

echo -e 'password\npassword\n' | sudo passwd username

Single quotes should suffice here.

Answer 5

Tralemonkey's solution almost worked for me as well ... but not quite. I ended up doing it this way:

echo -n '$#@password@#$' | passwd myusername --stdin

2 key details his solution didn't include, the -n keeps echo from adding a \n to the password that is getting encrypted, and the single quotes protect the contents from being interpreted by the shell (bash) in my case.

BTW I ran this command as root on a CentOS 5.6 system in case anyone is wondering.

Answer 6

You can run the passwd command and send it piped input. So, do something like:

echo thePassword | passwd theUsername --stdin