Sorry for the somewhat OT question, and if you don't
know FreeBSD, press delete and get back to work.

I've been given the task of writing a script that
automatically adds new client users on a new server
machine. Should be a no-brainer, right? I've been
writing stuff like that for 20 years. I wrote such a
script for our old BSD/OS system which is essentially a
wrapper around the adduser command. It has to do some
other things special to our needs, too, and is run by a
less-technical guy, which is why adduser is not used
directly.

So now we need the same functionality on a new FreeBSD
system, and as I examine the thing I find:

(a) FreeBSD adduser is not even remotely like adduser
    in either BSD/OS or Linux.

(b) FreeBSD adduser does not even accept a user *name*
    option.

(c) FreeBSD adduser does not read from stdin, so I
    can't just say echo "newusername" | adduser -options...
    In fact, when I try that, it goes into a wicked,
    rapidly spinning loop that has to be killed.

Surely there must be a canonical way to get where I'm
going from where I am, but I just don't know what it
is. Does anyone know what the key might be?

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ