How to mass create users

[Richard Doyle]

On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 12:01 -0700, Jim Hutchinson wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2008 11:33 AM, Joseph Hartman <jlhartman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've been reading a lot of recommendations for giving each student their own
> > account on the terminal server but I am loathe to go through the user
> > creation process dozens of times for each class. Is there a mass user
> > creation method I don't know about? Upload a .csv or something? Thanks -joe
> >
> 
> Joseph (and Barb I added you too since you asked about this),
> 
> I have attached a script that someone wrote for me for this exact
> purpose. I'm not 100% sure this is the debugged version so if anyone
> wants to proof it (or improve it) that would be welcome help. I did
> use this to add about 30 generic user names on our server. And it does
> just do generic accounts (like user001, user002 or whatever you
> choose) and the same password for all. Of course, passwords could be
> changed later by the users.
> 
> Hope that helps.
> Jim
> 
I'm not sure where I learned this, but one can use "echo" to
non-interactively enter a fixed password, using something like this to
create a user named "test" with password "12345":

user="test" ; adduser --disabled-login --gecos '' $user ; echo -e '12345\n12345' | passwd $user