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Cris
Asked: 2011-09-25 05:16:23 +0800 CST

Useradd and su strange terminal behavior

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I used useradd to create a user called oracle

After that I used su oracle i get in terminal just a $

Do you know why the terminal is not something like oracle@laptophp:~$ and is just a $ ?

ubuntu bash

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You probably did not create your new user with useradd -m. The -m copies the default ("skeleton") shell profile files from /etc to new users home dir.

    To resolve the issue, recreate the account or just copy the .bashrc, .bash_profile and .profile files from some other user account or from /etc/profile/.

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  2. You might also take a look at PS1 environment variable. If you type export PS1="$ ", your prompt will be just a dollar sign.

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  3. I have been having the exact same problem. Turns out there is an alternative to "useradd" called "adduser". This automatically copies the skeleton and everything needed.

    adduser <username>

    This code prompts you to fill in information about the user, and copies everything needed (as well as setting up a user directory).

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  4. After running the env command under my new user I noticed that:

    SHELL=/bin/sh

    If you run the useradd command with useradd -ms /bin/bash [USERNAME] then it should work as expected.

    -s allows you to modify the default shell.

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