How to clone a linux user?

Let’s take a look at how you can clone a linux user on a machine. The use case for this is when you want to create a new user with identical privileges as an existing user on the machine.

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#!/bin/bash
SRC=$1
DEST=$2

SRC_GROUPS=$(id -Gn ${SRC} | sed "s/ /,/g" | sed -r 's?\<'${SRC}'\>\b,?//g')
SRC_SHELL=$(awk -F : -v name=${SRC} '(name == $1) { print $7 }' /etc/passwd)

sudo useradd --groups ${SRC_GROUPS} --shell ${SRC_SHELL} --create-home ${DEST}
sudo passwd ${DEST}

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In order to use this script, assign executable permissions to this script and run the following command:

./[script_name] [user_to_clone] [cloned_user]

Test it out, and I hope you learned something new! 🙂