bulk addition of users from another system

[dochawk]

I try to keep the same user ids on the family and extended family machines; it's saved headaches over the years.

However, the list of users is getting tedious to type in one at a time every time.

I've tried clipping in the users with vipw from the passwd file from other systems, but without success on kubuntu (for freebsd, it just works).

Is there some magic order to editing passwd and its shadow, and again for groups? This really should be as simple as a ":r oldnames" in vi (and possibly regexp games if it's coming off a system with a different format for the files)

thanks

hawk

[Rob_H]

Re: bulk addition of users from another system

You could script it in Bash (or another scripting language). Alternatively, a simple google search for "linux export users" turned up this link, which might be useful. If all machines are on a shared network, though, you might want to look into an LDAP solution, which would let you manage all accounts from a central server.