How to create users on your system

We now have a completely working Arch Linux system. However, we still have a lot of things to do. The first thing we need to do is create a user.

# useradd -m -G additional_groups -s login_shell username

Here ‘wheel’ and ‘users’ will be the additional groups, the shell will be bash and user will be swapnil; of course, you will change the username.

# useradd -m -G wheel,users -s /bin/bash swapnil

Create a password for this user:

# passwd swapnil

Install ‘sudo’ so this user can perform administrative tasks :

# pacman -S sudo

Let’s handover sudo powers to this user. Edit the sudoers file using the visudo command:

# EDITOR=nano visudo

Un-comment this line in this file:

%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

Save and close the file with ‘Ctrl+x’ and then type ‘y’ to confirm. I also suggest installing the ‘bash-completion’ package which makes helps with auto completion of commands, paths and package names.

# pacman -S bash-completion

Alternatively, you can use ‘zsh’ shell which has more features than bash.