On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 03:35:00PM +0000, Stephan Beck wrote: > Sorry, Tomas, it's not Gene, it's me who has a special question > concerning ssh. > If you create a new user account ("test"), doing as root > adduser --disabled-password test > > How can you access this new account to generate an ssh key pair there?
Install sudo if you haven't already. Then: sudo -u test bash Or if you don't want a whole shell: sudo -u test ssh-keygen [options] The su program is not as useful for this kind of task, because it insists on launching the target user's shell, which in some cases is not a useful interactive command shell (e.g. /bin/false). sudo does not have this restriction.