Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

Creating a User’s Home Directory

One thing that NetInfo can’t do for you is create the user’s home directory. Mac OS X keeps a skeleton directory under the /System/Library/User Template directory. If you look in this directory, you’ll see localized versions of a user’s home directory. To copy the localized English version of the home directory, use the ditto command with the - -rsrc flag to preserve any resource forks that may exist:

    $ sudo ditto --rsrc \
                  
      /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj /Users/rothman

Then, use chown to recursively set the ownership of the home directory and all its contents (make sure you set the group to a group of which the user is a member):

    $ sudo chown -R rothman:rothman /Users/rothman

This change makes the new user the owner of his home directory and all its contents.