As a Linux administrator, there are many tasks you’ll find yourself managing. And no matter how you try and avoid the command line, at some point it’s going to become quite evident that the terminal is a must-use. You’ll find yourself faced with working on a headless server, or remoting into your datacenter, at which point the Command Line Interface (CLI) will become your best friend.

This is especially true when it comes to managing users. Those Linux servers might be used for FTP, SMB, mail, web, or a host of other services. When that’s the case, you need to be able to add, remove, and otherwise manage your users. When a server doesn’t have a GUI, you’ve got only one choice—the command line.

But how can you manage users from the CLI? Believe it or not, you have plenty of tools available. Within this document from TechRepublic Premium you’ll find all of the commands you need to manage users from the command line on a Linux machine. With these commands in your toolkit, you won’t have any problem working with users on your datacenter servers. Without a solid understanding of these basic commands, you’ll have a hard time accomplishing simple tasks on headless or remote Linux servers.