MacOS – Using Command Line how to make the user an Administrator

administratorcommand linemacos

As soon I bind a Mac to the AD Domain, I usually log into the Mac with the user account.

Of course, under System Preference, User & Groups, the user account is marked as: Managed, Mobile

My second step, is to make the user an Administrator account because I want to allow him/her to install/remove stuff from her/his Mac.

So, with the GUI, System Preferences > Users & Groups > I select the user name and I check mark the option: enable Allow user to administer this computer and I restart the machine and everything works fine. The user now is an Admin for that machine.

Question, how do I perform the above process with the command line in Terminal? Not the bind process, but to make the user Admin for that specific machine.

Best Answer

sudo dscl . -merge /Groups/admin GroupMembership username

where ‘username’ is the username of the user you would like to make an admin.

sudo since making changes like this requires elevated privileges.
dscl is the Directory Service command line utility.
. is the local machine.
-merge allows you to add a new key to a record path.
/Groups/admin is the record path for the key.
GroupMembership is the key you would like to assign a value.
username is the value for the key.

Related Solutions

Can user accounts be managed via the command line

To create an account in the Users folder

dscl / -create /Users/addfromcli

Create and set the shell property to bash.

dscl / -create /Users/addfromcli UserShell /bin/bash

Create and set the user’s full name. (Displayed in some of the panels/login screen)

dscl / -create /Users/addfromcli RealName "Added From Cli"

Create and set the user’s ID. (this is the unique id, you need to find out what id your last user create was and add one)

dscl / -create /Users/addfromcli UniqueID 503

Create and set the user’s group ID property. (This can be your default group)

dscl / -create /Users/addfromcli PrimaryGroupID 1000

Create and set the user home directory.

dscl / -create /Users/addfromcli NFSHomeDirectory /Local/Users/addfromcli

Set the password. (dont use password as a password)

dscl / -passwd /Users/addfromcli PASSWORD

Some more details can be found on OS X Daily

User rights of a super user and the administrator

This is by design. A non-admin user is defined by not being able to use sudo (and the graphical equivalent in the mac windowmanager). You can still enter the admin user and password using sudo -u or the graphical equivalent but short of compromising/modifying the built in controls, that's how the system is designed to work.

The su command doesn't work as you expect since the root user in Mac OS X is disabled by default for security reasons. Sudo has enhanced logging and sudo -s gets you the same shell as su - would when a root user is enabled.

So if you don't want to change to using sudo you can enable root on your mac.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Can user accounts be managed via the command line

User rights of a super user and the administrator

Related Question