Setting up and modifying user accounts via the command line on OSX is a bit of pain. The supplied tools to do it require one to not only set reasonable things, such as login name, but to also choose a unique id, assign a primary group etc., things that the graphical way of creating users automatically populate with sensible defaults.
Examples of when one might need to do this are: when a machine is only accessible via ssh; when a sysadmin wants a script to run on multiple machines to setup a series of user accounts.
On Linux there are utilities such as useradd which has many options, but crucially has sensible defaults such that in practice only a few need be specified to create a new account, eg.:
Inspired by personal experience of attempting to create a new user account on an OSX machine via ssh, I wrote versions of useradd etc. for OSX, which are available here. Of course I only implemented the features that I needed at the time... but will perhaps make them more complete in the future.
Examples of when one might need to do this are: when a machine is only accessible via ssh; when a sysadmin wants a script to run on multiple machines to setup a series of user accounts.
On Linux there are utilities such as useradd which has many options, but crucially has sensible defaults such that in practice only a few need be specified to create a new account, eg.:
useradd -m -c 'Joe Bloggs' joe
Inspired by personal experience of attempting to create a new user account on an OSX machine via ssh, I wrote versions of useradd etc. for OSX, which are available here. Of course I only implemented the features that I needed at the time... but will perhaps make them more complete in the future.
