adduser with existing home directory ownership incorrect

iii_iii · 07-15-2016, 03:32 PM

After installing slackware with an already existing /home partition with a few users, I used adduser to add the users in /home to /etc/passwd. It told me that the users' home directory existed and asked if I wanted to change ownership to which I said yes. On the third user I added the ownership was changed to that of the second user.

This maybe a symptom of adduser and not slackware. Has anyone seen this? Should I report it as a bug?

riwi · 07-17-2016, 06:55 AM

If you check your /etc/passwd file you will see the users defined and their uid's.
Probably on the old system you had the users defined in a different order.

So the uid of the userA on the old system now matches the uid of userB on the new system.
The adduser script just took the new uid value for the old /home folder.

You can either change the uid in the passwd file or do a new chown on the /home/folder with the correct username.

iii_iii · 07-27-2016, 11:00 AM

I am puzzled by that. If I am adding a user, should it not do something like:

chown -R username /home/username

So the userid should be irrelevant. I am still more confused by two users being added both with adduser and both using the change owner option, them ending up with the same owner.

I am not sure if I will be able to see what happened now as I fixed the problem. Perhaps I will try to recreate it.