SKEL=/etc/skel

Notice that this information is also available in the file /etc/default/useradd

Step 2: Activate the account with a new password
To allow a user to access his or her account the administrator must allocate a p
assword to the user using the passwd tool.
Syntax:
passwd login-name
These steps create a new user. This has also defined the users environment such a
s a home directory and a default shell. The user has also been assigned to a gro
up, his primary group.
Working with groups
Every new user is assigned to an initial (or primary) group. Two conventions exi
st.
Traditionally this primary group is the same for all users and is called users w
ith a group id (GID) of 100. Many Linux distributions adhere to this convention
such as Suse and Debian.
The User Private Group scheme (UPG) was introduced by RedHat and changes this co
nvention without changing the way in which UNIX groups work. With UPG each new u
ser belongs to their own primary group. The group has the same name as the login
-name (default), and the GID is in the 500 to 60000 range (same as UIDs).
As a consequence, when using the traditional scheme for groups the users umask (s
ee LPI 101) is set to 022, whereas in the UPG scheme the umask is set to 002.
Belonging to groups
A user can belong to any number of groups. However at any one time (when creatin
g a file for example) only one group is the effective group.
The list of all groups a user belongs to is obtained with either the groups or i
d commands.
Example for user root: