Chapter 28: Managing Users

Overview

As a system administrator, you must manage the users of your system. You can add or remove users, as well as add and remove groups, and you can modify access rights and permissions for both users and groups. You also have access to system initialization files you can use to configure all user shells. And you have control over the default initialization files copied into a user account when it is first created. You can decide how new user accounts should be configured initially by configuring these files.

Tip

Every file is owned by a user who can controls access to it. System files are owned by the root user and accessible by the root only. Services like FTP are an exception to this rule. Though accessible by the root, a service's files are owned by their own special user. For example, FTP files are owned by an ftp user. This provides users with access to a service's files without also having root user access.