I don't have an admin account on my Mac. I don't know how it happened and now I want to add one because I cant do anything thing without it and I can't add a new user without an admin account.
MacOS – restart the Mac without an admin account
administratormacos
Related Solutions
Seems like you could use the SU command to switch to another user in Terminal. Once you've switched to the admin user you can use sudo commands coupled with the admin account's password.
For example, when I'm at one of my end user's Macs and I need to run something with elevated privileges (chown for example) without logging out and into the admin account (ladmin) I would use something like this (in bold):
Mr-Rabbits-Mac:~ notadminuser$ su ladmin
This will prompt for the ladmin account's password, once entered you will see a bash command prompt. From here I can run any sudo commands desired, entering ladmin's password as needed...
bash-3.2$ sudo chown user2 /some/folder
This will run the chown command using the now logged in ladmin user, prompting for the ladmin account's password. Once finished you can type exit to return to your logged in user's prompt.
Screenshot of similar process, only using sudo to run the ls command (just for example).
You are looking for the dscl command. You can do it through ARD unix command to multiple machines at once, or send via ssh per machine. There's lots of discussion and great information here - What steps are needed to create a new user from the command line?
To summarize those answers, here's a quick admin user addition.
dscl . create /Users/corybohon
dscl . create /Users/corybohon UserShell /bin/bash
dscl . create /Users/corybohon RealName "Cory Bohon"
dscl . create /Users/corybohon UniqueID 503
dscl . create /Users/corybohon PrimaryGroupID 1000
dscl . create /Users/corybohon NFSHomeDirectory /Local/Users/corybohon
dscl . passwd /Users/corybohon PASSWORD
dscl . append /Groups/admin GroupMembership corybohon
A logout or restart will be needed for the user to show as admin in the System Preferences.
On a side note, I am not sure if this still works with Yosemite, but MagerVelp has a app called "CreateUserPkg" that can be used to deploy users. CreateUserPkg, I use it with our MDM solution to push users as a pkg.
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Best Answer
OK - you don't need admin to restart, but let's get you an admin user anyhow. you need one and the time to do it is sooner rather than later.
This requires a restart to begin this process, please save your work and buckle up.
You didn't edit in what version, so we'll assume macOS Mojave version. You can always ask a follow on question if you discover you can't use the general advice. Be sure to list your Mac OS version, though or get local or Apple support if you can't find that out either.
The first is how you can make sure you don't have some admin user you can reset the password, the next two have awesome answers that are basically the same.
Restart in single user mode and mount the drive and remove one file. That causes the next start to offer you to make a brand new admin account, not erasing any data - but just adding a new user / password you know to make your existing account an admin.