tech-userlevel archive


Re: default skel files (Re: PAGER=less)

> Probably very few admins use our useradd(8) tool,
> or all of you have proper own skel files?

I actually think skel files as our user tools use them have outlived
their usefulness.  They are based on the premise that there is a useful
level of commonality among users on a machine.  There was probably a
time when this was true, but I don't think it's a useful premise any
longer.  Now, the commonalities are more per-human than per-host; my
own machines, for example, have perhaps a half-dozen human users, and
each one of them is far more interested in having things in common with
that human's accounts elsewhere than in having things in common with
other humans' accounts on my system.

When I create a guest user, I usually leave it completely bare and let
the user configure it - or not - as desired.  Perhaps that's just my
"treat others as you would like to be treated" tendencies kicking in.

What really bugs _me_ is the whole /etc/shells disaster.  Someday it's
going to irritate me enough to rip getusershell() out entirely, to make
it easy to find anything that's caught that disease.  (The problem is,
strictly, less with /etc/shells and more with getusershell(); given the
API, there is no way, even by replacing the implementation, to allow
the sysadmin to configure things like "anything owned by this user is
OK" or "anything in or under this directory is OK", at least not
without ruinous inefficiency.)

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