Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

#44 Adding Users to the System

If you're responsible for managing a network of Unix or Linux systems, you've already experienced the frustration caused by subtle incompatibilities among the different operating systems in your dominion. Some of the most basic administration tasks prove to be the most incompatible across different flavors of Unix, and chief among these tasks is user account management. Rather than have a single command-line interface that is 100 percent consistent across all Unix flavors, each vendor has developed its own graphical interface for working with the peculiarities and quirks of its own Unix.

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was, ostensibly, supposed to help normalize this sort of thing, but managing user ...