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User ID
 (
UID
) and 
Group 
ID
 (
GID
) of 
1002
, and it 
also copied files from 
/etc/skel
 into our new user's 
home
 
directory. In fact, both the 
adduser
 and 
useradd
 commands copy files from 
/etc/
skel
, but 
adduser
 is more verbose regarding the actions it performs.
In a nutshell, the 
adduser
 command is much more convenient in the sense that it 
prompts you for various options while it creates the user without requiring that 
you memorize command-line options. It also gives you detailed information about 
what it has done. At this point, you may be wondering why someone would want 
to use 
useradd
 at all, considering how much more convenient 
adduser
 seems to 
be. Unfortunately, 
adduser
 is not available on all distributions of Linux. It's best to 
familiarize yourself with 
useradd
 in case you find yourself on a Linux system that's 
not Ubuntu.
It may be interesting for you to see what exactly the 
adduser
 command is. It's not 
even a binary program—it's a 
shell script
. A shell script
 is simply a text file that 
can be executed as a program. You don't have to worry too much about scripting 
now, as we will cover it in 
Chapter 6
, 
Boosting Your Command-Line Efficiency
. In the 
case of 
adduser
, it's a script written in 
Perl
, which is a programming language that 
is sometimes used for administrative tasks. Since it's not binary, you can even open 
it in a text editor in order to view all the code that it executes behind the scenes. 
However, make sure you don't open the file in a text editor with 
root
 privileges, to 
ensure that you don't accidentally save changes to the file and break the script. The 
following command will open 
adduser
 in a text editor on an Ubuntu Server system:
nano /usr/sbin/adduser
Don't worry if you don't understand 
UID
, 
GID
, and 
/etc/skel
 yet. 
We'll work through those concepts soon.

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Chapter 2