Roy's Techblog

One thing that has significantly changed since 10.4 is that NetInfo is gone. To create users, you now have to use dscl, and the syntax is quite different than with nictl.

Here’s what I did to add a user for AMANDA, a backup program:

sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/amanda
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/amanda RecordName amanda
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/amanda UserShell /bin/bash
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/amanda RealName "Backup User" 
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/amanda UniqueID 5000
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/amanda PrimaryGroupID 0
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Users/amanda NFSHomeDirectory /Users/amanda