create home directories after create users

Question

I created some users with:

$ useradd john

and I forgot to specify the parameter -m to create the home directory and to have the skeleton files copied to each user. now I want to do that, and I don't want to recreate all users (there must be an easier way). so, is there any way to create the user directories and copy the skeleton files?

I thought about creating the directories, chowning them to the corresponding user, copying all the skeleton files and chowning them to the corresponding user. but if there's a command like useradd -m that doesn't create the user again, but create the directories, it'd be better.

Answer 1

This might sound like a silly idea, but if the users aren't actually doing anything, you could do:

cat /etc/passwd | cut -f 1 -d : >/tmp/users.list

Then edit /tmp/users.list to only contain the users you want. Then do:

for i in `cat /tmp/users.list`
do
    userdel $i
    useradd -m $i
done

However, many Redhat based distributions will create you a new home directory when you first login, providing it is specified in /etc/passwd where the directory should be.

To test that, do an "su - " and see if it does "the right thing". If it doesn't, the above script will work quite nicely, I think.

Answer 2

usermod -d /home/john john

That should do the trick I believe

Answer 3

You can use something like pam_mkhomedir to prevent this from ever being an issue with any users in the future. pam_mkhomedir is a PAM module that automatically creates a user's home directory on login if it doesn't exist, and populates it with files from /etc/skel (or whatever skel directory you specify).

This is also a nicely scalable approach because it will continue to solve this problem if you ever switch your user repository over to a directory service like LDAP in the future.

Answer 4

You will need to create the users directory manually. This requires three steps:

1. Create directory in compliance to /etc/passwd, usually there will be already a /home/login entry.
2. Copy initial files from /etc/skel

3. And finally set right permissions:

   • mkdir /home/YOU
   • cd /home/YOU
   • cp /etc/skel/.* /etc/skel/* . But check for directories you might have missed to copy
   • chown -R YOU.YOURGROUP .
   • chmod -R go=u,go-w .
   • chmod go= .

BTW: I always miss the "-m" option for useradd too. At least Debian based systems should also have and adduser command which I would recommend over useradd.

Answer 5

My first step after doing a useradd is to su - <user>.

Creates the home directories, copies skeletons, etc - at least on the CentOS 4 box I do that on most frequently.

Answer 6

You could simply edit /etc/passwd. The second to the last field is the user's home directory.

greeblesnort:x:1000:1000:greeblesnort,,,:/home/greeblesnort:/bin/bash