Following my earlier post: -
TIL passwd on Ubuntu no longer supports the stdin option
I found a better way ...
groupadd wasadmins
adduser --quiet --disabled-password --ingroup wasadmins -shell /bin/bash --home /home/wasadmin --gecos "wasadmin" wasadmin
echo "wasadmin:passw0rd!" | chpasswd
The main benefit of this is that, unlike useradd, the adduser command sets up the new user's profile, by copying from /etc/skel etc.
Nice!