Create Linux user with password

Sometimes it’s necessary to create Linux user accounts in batch mode (fully automatic) but often newbies ask how to set password for a new user without entering it manually. Thanks to heaven command useradd can get password as an input parameter, but it should be encrypted.

In other words, to create Linux user account with password the following command will be useful:

useradd -m -p encryptedPass username

I know at least two ways to get password encrypted. The first one is to use perl crypt(); function:

perl -e 'print crypt("password_to_be_encrypted", "salt"),"\n"'

which will give you an output sa3tHJ3/KuYvI.

The second way (more simple) is to use command:

openssl passwd password_to_be_encrypted