3) Can anyone recommend a good source of information on writing shell scripts - I might then be able to fiddle around with the passwd command.
does the csv file just have a list of comma seperated usernames, or does it contain any other information such as Full name, password etc.? a shell/perl script could be easily devised to make use of such a file. eg. if the file contains just usernames like matthew,,james,harry,william then something like "cat users.csv | tr "," "\n" | xargs -i /usr/sbin/useradd {}" to start with you might want to set their usernames to their passwds (uh!) "cat users.csv | tr "," "\n" | xargs -i setpasswd {}" where the script setpasswd = "printf "$1\n" | passwd --stdin -f $1" this cmd line can be made a lot more complicated as other values such as fullname, password are present in the file. hope this is a start!