Tiny Tips 4 : Adding Users in Bulk for Windows XP

Date [ 10 Oct 06 00:00 UTC ] Categories [ Tech , Tiny Tips ]

Recently I came across a requirement where it was needed to create user accounts in bulk from a CSV file. Initially I thought there should be a ready made option present for doing this from command line and was happy to locate a KB article about AddUsers.exe, but it seems that the AddUsers.exe file is only available for Windows NT server and Windows 2000 Server operating systems.

A bit more digging into the available commands in Windows XP brought up net user, though this is not a utility for creating user accounts in bulk it provides an option to create user accounts quickly. So I hacked in a command line application which will accept a CSV file and execute the net user command internally.

Source follows:

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using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Diagnostics;
 
namespace BulkAddUsers {
    class Program {
        static int Main(string[] args) {
            if (args.Length &lt;1) {
                Console.WriteLine("[Usage]");
                Console.WriteLine("BulkAddUsers &lt;filename&gt; [&lt;character&gt;]");
                Console.WriteLine("&lt;filename&gt; is the name of the file which contains the user name and password of the users in CSV format");
                Console.WriteLine("&lt;character&gt; is the separatation character used in the CSV file (comma (,) , semicolon (;) , space ( ))");
                return -1;
            }
 
            string csvFile = args[0];
            char sepChar = ',';
 
            if (args.Length&gt; 1) {
                sepChar = args[1][0];
            }
 
           
 
            string csvContents = string.Empty;
 
            using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(csvFile)) {
                while ((csvContents = sr.ReadLine()) != null) {
                    //Split on sepChar
                    string[] tokens = csvContents.Split(sepChar);
 
                    string command = "net";
                    string arguments = "user " + tokens[0] + " "+ tokens[1] +" /add";
 
                    Process p = new Process();
                    p.StartInfo.FileName = command;
                    p.StartInfo.Arguments = arguments;
                    p.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
 
                    p.StartInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;
 
                    p.Start();
                    p.WaitForExit();
 
                    if (p.ExitCode != 0) {
                        Console.WriteLine("Error creating user {0}, return code {1}", tokens[0], p.ExitCode);
                    }
                }
            }
 
            return 0;
        }
    }
}