adding/editing a new user question

[churchillBURNS]

Hi all,
I'm new to this forum so apologies if my etiquette is not appropriate or my question is in the wrong area. I am new to using Kali and am trying to add a new user with admin privileges. I'm quite certain I did this wrong because when I cmd "whoami" the output is "root". This is what is displayed when logged in: root@kali:/home/examplename#

If this is a root account, does it replace the existing account (changed ) or just added another account with root privilege?

And yes, I am aware of the dangers with using root privileges. Believe me, after living with a personality disorder and surviving addiction, depression, and a suicide attempt, I am confident I'll treat this with respect. Cybersecurity is my second chance in life to do some good and help "everyday folks" from being exploited. I do take this seriously.

Any help is much appreciated and I look forward to connecting with people along the way. Take care.

cB

[Shellhopper]

Accounts in Unix, including Linux have numbers, internally, not names. The name-to-number and number-to-name translation are done by referencing a file called /etc/passwd.

So, let's say you add a user ID called "toor" but the /etc/passwd file says that "toor" has a uid of zero. The login process should lookup toor and assign the uid of zero to the processes that are attached to init and are the shell or whatever (X server, maybe, or a kiosk shell) but the process has the permissions associated with uid 0. Now, when you want to know the associated name, you use something like whoami and it looks up 0 in /etc/passwd. The name you logged in with is immaterial. It looks up 0 and finds the first match, in your case, root.

The typical way a "user with admin privs" is done is to create (or use an existing) admin group, and then, when you need a root command, you can use sudo. It is fairly easy to tell sudo not to require passwords from people in such a group.

I don't think that Linux had studio when I started using it on my 486/33, maybe the dist I used had 10 diskettes so I got out of the habit, but now I'm trying to use it more.