<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii"> <TITLE>Message</TITLE> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1400" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY> <DIV>Try escaping the quotes with backslashes. I have a script that does something similar....it first checks to make sure the user is a valid university account....here's my code. It also prompts the user to enter a password (in a bash shell script):</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV> print "Adding user $username...\n"; `/usr/sbin/useradd "$username" -g users -c \"$realname\"`; `passwd $username`; </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> ----- Ryan Golhar Computational Biologist The Informatics Institute at The University of Medicine & Dentistry of NJ Phone: 973-972-5034 Fax: 973-972-7412 Email: golharam@umdnj.edu <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <DIV></DIV> <DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left>-----Original Message----- From: redhat-list-bounces@redhat.com [mailto:redhat-list-bounces@redhat.com] On Behalf Of Johnson, Shaunn Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 4:45 PM To: 'General Red Hat Linux discussion list' Subject: rebuilding accounts </DIV> Howdy: Running RHEL v.3. I'm moving user home directories to the new server and I need to add them to passwd / shadow and group files. I make a script like so: [snip] #!/bin/bash -x echo "building users account" echo " " for i in `cat /tmp/lusers.txt` do echo "making account for the user: $i" echo " " /usr/sbin/useradd -d /opt/home/$i -g users -M -p $i -s /bin/bash $i done [/snip] The when I try to su - <user>, I get 'su: incorrect password'. (note: I did this as a non-root user). I thought that maybe I should use single or double quotes when putting the password on the line, but the errors are always the same. Question: With useradd, is there a way to prompt users for a new password upon login? Otherwise, I will have to write some one-liner to use 'passwd' to generate default passwords. Thanks! -X </BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>