specification for adding users and groups

[Daniel Quinlan]

"Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo" <jkaivo at ndn.net> writes:

> Comparing RH 5.2 and Debian 2.1, both have an adduser command as well
> as useradd. On RH, adduser is a symlink to useradd, which is from
> shadow utils. On Debian, useradd is the same showdow utils command,
> and adduser is a (quite different) Perl script apparently Debian
> specific. All are non-interactive and allow specifying of several
> options such as UID, GID, etc.

> In a cursory glance through a couple of volumes, I don't see any
> specification of user administration tools in SUS2.

Hmmm... the shadow tools are probably based on SVR4.  Solaris has:

     useradd  [ -c comment ]   [  -d dir  ]   [  -e expire  ]   [
     -f inactive ]  [ -g group ]  [ -G group  [ , group ...  ]  ]
     [ -m  [ -k skel_dir ]  ]  [ -u uid  [ -o ]  ]  [ -s shell  ]
     login

     useradd -D  [ -b base_dir ]  [ -e expire ]  [ -f inactive  ]
     [ -g group ]

which is similar to the Red Hat 6.0 one.  And most of the accessory
commands are similar too.
 
>>  * Document existing practice (one way that one or more Linux
>>    distributions do it)
 
> It seems that useradd from shadow utils would be a good starting
> point, if not finishing.

We should try to fold in any especially useful features from the Debian
adduser program, if possible.
 
>> The main prerequisite for the specification is a brave person to handle
>> the whole user/group specification.  Any volunteers?
 
> What would need to be specified? Syntax for the commands? Reserved
> user/group names/numbers?

Command syntax.  Reserved names, probably.  Maybe reserve some number
ranges if we allow numbers to be specified, but tackle that last.

Afterwards, we also need the sample implementation side of things, which
should be relatively simple.

- Dan