Hi Frantisek, frantisek holop wrote on Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 12:34:59AM +0200:
> this question was always kind of in the back of my mind: > why are there 2 sets of commands for adding and removing > users? Purely historical reasons, AFAIK. > looking at the man pages their functionalities quite overlap > and i am not really sure which one is the preferred, if any. Purely a matter of taste. For example, i use neither. If you have few users, visudo, vi, mkdir, chown and friends do the job just fine. If you have many users, you have your own scripts anyway. [...] > one should take over everything and the other one should be booted, no? If you insist on breaking scripts for many users... The situation is not nice (neither is the code), but the ugliness does not appear to be so bad that anybody improved it yet. Also, i doubt that new users should do that kind of cleanup as one of their first projects, and it's not really clear what should be done. Perhaps rewriting one tool from scratch, providing both interfaces, cutting down the total amount of code by a factor of four or more? But that may take more time than it's worth, given that those tools are not that important in the first place. Yours, Ingo
