Useradd is old, and does a decent job, but it pre-dates pw, which means it edits /etc/master.passwd and runs pwd_mkdb by hand. It is scarey to hack on for these reasons. It is also not maintained. In August, 1999 I submitted a script I had written to replace adduser, called enteruser, to Daemon News. An article talking about the rational for the script, how it works, and how it can be hacked on, can be found at http://www.daemonnews.org/199908/enteruser.html Occasionally I get e-mail from people asking about the "latest version" of Enteruser ... but it kinda like adduser, it does my bidding already, so what's this latest version stuff? Anyway, if you guys wanted to replace adduser, I would be happy to maintain it, by addressing bugs and feature requests. EnterUser is implicitly licensed under BSD terms anyway. You are more than welcome to it. Fix: A copy of the article can be found at: http://dell.dannyland.org/~dannyman/stuff/enteruser/ The script itself: http://dell.dannyland.org/~dannyman/stuff/enteruser/enteruser
adduser(8) is still maintained (please see the CVS log) and has been tested thoroughly by now. You see, replacing it with enteruser isn't an option. Adding yet another (third!) user-adding utility to the base system isn't, either. Have you considered making a port of enteruser?
State Changed From-To: open->closed While this looks like a nice script, Yar sums up the situation well in explaining that this won't ever enter the base system as adduser is still maintained.
For the record, I have finally gotten around to submitting the port. :) -danny