Jonoabroad

A place to leave my rants and ramblings.

Creating a user from the commandline on OS X

The following will create a user USER_NAME in the group USER_NAME
with a home directory /Users/USER_NAME, it assumes you have sudo
access and are currently in /Users

  1. Find the next free uid by running the following

    nireport . /users name uid

  • create user, assuming a free uid of 505 from the previous step.

    This should be a single line.

    echo USER_NAME::505:505:USER_NAME build user:0:0:USER_NAME
    User:/Users/USER_NAME:/bin/bash | sudo niload -v passwd /

  • Set password

    sudo passwd USER_NAME

  • create group

    echo 'USER_NAME:*:505: USER_NAME' | sudo niload -v group /

  • create user directory

    mkdir USER_NAME

  • change ownership

    sudo chown USER_NAME:USER_NAME USER_NAME

  • make sure you can login

    ssh USER_NAME@localhost

    • As an aside here is how to delete a user via the command line.

    1. check the user exists

      dscl . read /users/USER_NAME

  • delete the users group

    sudo dscl . delete /groups/USER_NAME

  • delete the user

    sudo dscl . delete /users/USER_NAME

  • delete user home directory

    sudo rm -rf USER_NAME

    • Taken from