Hello, On Mon, 13 May 2013 00:12:45 +0200 Eduard Bloch <e...@gmx.de> wrote: > clone 706382 -1 > retitle -1 Recreating a system user fails when its UID is out of range > reassign -1 adduser > severity -1 minor > thanks > > As discussed, the error handling in this case needs some improvement. As > least there should be a meaningful error message telling where the > error originated. > > And/or it maybe should not be an error whatsoever, i.e. when the account > exists then there is no need to recreate it. >
What happened in this case was that adduser was asked to add a system user while the name is already taken by a *regular* user (maybe that is the key word missing from the printed message), as determined by the system UID range. The system user range can be changed by the administrator in /etc/adduser.conf if they want to use a different range to determine what a system user is. I'd appreciate any suggestions to make this more clear so this confusion can be avoided in the future. Thanks and regards Afif -- Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي http://afif.ghraoui.name