As a system administrator, one of your jobs is managing users and groups. Without the proper care and feeding of this particular task, your company would have a hard time functioning properly and securely. Why? Because left to their own devices, users wouldn’t have the necessary permissions needed to function. They wouldn’t belong to the various groups required to get their work done. They’d be using password123 to access their accounts, and new users wouldn’t be added to the systems.

You, as the sysadmin are the keeper of that particular kingdom. You add, delete, and modify users, and create groups to make your (and your users) daily jobs a bit easier. But what tools do you use to actually take care of this task?

As you might expect, given that this is Linux, there are a number of tools at your disposal. Let’s focus on the command line tools for the task. Why? Because the GUIs are all fairly straightforward and simple to use. The command line tools might be a bit more challenging, especially to new Linux admins. And given there is often more than one route to success, it can sometimes get a bit confusing.

Let’s strip away that confusion and make the job of user and group management a bit easier.

Most every command you will find here is universal. In other words, they’ll run on nearly any Linux distribution. So whether you’re a Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, or CentOS server admin, you should find these commands very helpful.