Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, Apple iPhone, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

Getting the "adduser" script to work on Linux

A reader writes:

" Hi, I'm a very beginner at shell scripting and unix/linux. I have your book (Wicked Cool Shell Scripts) and it is really great. So far I've done two or three, Inpath is the one i use most. I'm going make a user for an ftp account so my friends can upload/download songs and other files. I decided to use your adduser script for the job but when i run the script i get an erorr like - /etc/passwd : permission denied. How do i give the script permission to write to /etc/passwd? Sorry if this is an obvious question but i couldn't find an answer. I used chmod 755 and ran it as root. By the way, i really like the site and book cover, i wish all linux/programming manuals had really cool covers."

Dave's Answer: First off, thanks for the kind words!

In terms of your problem, I would want to see the permissions of both the file /etc/passwd, and, since it needs to add information to it too, /etc/shadow too.

If you're running as root, theoretically, all should be well, but Linux isn't 100% predictable, so...

Please respond with that information as a comment to this thread and we'll continue to debug your problem!

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Stumble Upon

Categorized: Shell Script Programming (Article 3714)
Tagged:
Previous: Nice writeup of my "Creating Cool Web Sites" book
Next: Tweaking spacing in standard HTML

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

Comments

how to find root password using shell script?

Posted by: v at November 26, 2005 10:10 AM

Well, gosh, hmmm... if you want to learn how to hack into a Linux system, I think you've come to the wrong place. :-)

Posted by: Dave Taylor at November 26, 2005 2:38 PM

I have the same error:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1117 Jul 24 11:32 shadow
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1616 Jul 24 11:31 passwd

Posted by: joey at July 24, 2008 5:27 AM

Hi i wanted to know how will i write a post installation script in a kickstart file in linux to changes a few words in the inittab file for example "kernel" to kerne!" and also the grub.conf and the fstab entries as well. coz i want to create an automated troubleshooting situations for myself

Posted by: Vinit at September 3, 2008 3:24 PM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!