Hi All,

Using Slack 11.

I deleted a user with userdel and then tried to re-create
the account with the same username using adduser.

It told me "the user already exists".

I did a grep in /etc for the username and removed it from
group-, passwd-, shadow-, etc, manually. I even re-booted.

It still fails the same way. Am I missing something?

Exeunt

Did you also remove the users from the files without dashes: group, passwd, shadow?

I've never understood what the point of those dashed files is. Anyway, afaik, adduser only checks the three dashless files.

It may be failing because/if the former users' $HOME directory still exists.

No it will not fail if the homedirectory exists. The 'adduser' command will complain with "- User 'username' already exists; please choose another" only if it is already present in /etc/passwd .
If you want the exact user account back, please check the user-id number of the account you deleted (ls -la /home will show you the numerical uidNumber when the account has been deleted) and when 'adduser' asks for "User ID ('UID') [ defaults to next available ]:" enter the number that you see being used for the deleted user in /home . IF you fail to do so, the new account gets another number and will not be able to work with the files in the old homedirectory.

Eric

Everybody,

Thanks for all your suggestions. I found the problem
and it was pretty simple.

I had ypbind running and I had log-ins on Sun workstations
on the network with the same user name.

So I just disabled ypbind, pulled the Ethernet cable to be
really sure, rebooted, and had no problem recreating the
account.

The clue was I looked at the useradd code, found that it
called "getpwnam()", and wrote a small C program to call
this function.

When I saw it find a password for me it was obvious it
came from the network.

Simple, and pretty stupid of me.

Thanks again,

Exeunt