Now that you know how to add a new account and group by hand, I'm going to review the various time-saving account administration utilities available under Linux. Due to space constraints, I won't be going into a lot of detail describing these commands. Remember that you can always get more information about a command by viewing the command's man page. If you are planning to take the LPIC 101 exam, I recommend that you spend some time familiarizing yourself with each of these commands.

newgrp

By default, any files that a user creates are assigned to the user's group specified in /etc/passwd. If the user belongs to other groups, he or she can type newgrp thisgroup to set current default group membership to the group thisgroup. Then, any new files created will inherit this group membership.

chage

The chage command is used to view and change the password aging setting stored in /etc/shadow

gpasswd

A general-purpose group administration tool

groupadd/groupdel/groupmod

Used to add/delete/modify groups in /etc/group