Creating User Accounts

Use the useradd and passwd commands to create a user and set a password.

To create a user account using the default settings, enter the following command:
```
sudo useradd [options] username
```
By default, if you specify a username argument with no other options, useradd creates a locked user account using the next available UID and assigns a user private group (UPG) rather than the value defined for GROUP as the user's group.

Note:

Valid usernames contain only lowercase and uppercase letters, digits, underscores (_), or dashes (-). Dashes aren't allowed at the beginning of the username. The username can end with a dollar sign ($). Fully numeric usernames and usernames . or .. aren't allowed.
Assign a password to the account, by entering the following command.
```
sudo passwd username
```
The command prompts you to enter a password for the account.

To change the password noninteractively (for example, from a script), use the chpasswd command instead:
```
echo "username:password" | chpasswd
```

You can use the newusers command to create several user accounts at the same time. The newusers command reads the account information from a text file.

For more information about creating user accounts from the command line, see the chpasswd(8), newusers(8), passwd(1), and useradd(8) manual pages.

To create user accounts with a web-based GUI, see Oracle Linux: Using the Cockpit Web Console.