I'm about to convert my company workstations from slackware to red hat enterprise using a red hat satellite server. For those of you new to the satellite server it basically allows you to install a red hat OS across your network with one boot cd and a short command at the start then it's hands off. This makes it easier to update and install mass amounts of workstations at one time.

One of the features of a "kickstart" they call it is the post script where you can basically input shell commands to be run after the OS is installed. I would love to be able to utilize this to create all of the admin accounts with the following:

useradd <admin_name> -G wheel -p <encrypted_password>

another option to solve the same issue could be:
useradd <admin_name> -G wheel
echo "<entry from /etc/shadow>" >> /etc/shadow


I'm having some real issues solving either of these options. I'm unsure of how to use the crypt command to generate a proper password entry. Also when you echo a line like what you see in /etc/shadow you lose much of the line, it seems to conflict with the "$"s. Either of these methods should have the same end results.

Thanks in advance!

Solved! After toying here's how to do it:

useradd -G wheel -p <encrypted password>

where <encrypted password> is:

1- create shadow entry using passwd on linux box
2- tail the /etc/shadow and you'll see:
<userAccount>:$1$<string1>$<string2>:<numbers>:<numbers>etc...)
3- Highlight everything from "$1$<string1>$<string2>"
4- paste this after the "-p" in useradd
5- escape out the "$"s using "\"
6- hit enter!

end result should be:
useradd -G wheel -p \$1\$<string1>\$<string2>