On Sat, January 24, 2015 9:54 pm, Always Learning wrote:
On Sat, 2015-01-24 at 22:45 -0500, Stephen Harris wrote:
On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 03:43:06AM +0000, Always Learning wrote:
Should the 'correct' entry be:-
fred:x:504:504:::/sbin/nologin ?
No; that's invalid. There must be an entry in the home directory field.
Thanks Stephen and Dennis for the helpful explanation.
I will use: useradd -d /dev/null -s /sbin/nologin snowman
Interesting. I'm usually putting slightly more effort in creation of such users. I do create them with regular command
/usr/sbin/useradd -s /sbin/nologin -c "Whatever user or something" whatever /usr/sbin/usermod -d /var/nonexistent whatever /bin/rm -rf /home/whatever /bin/rm -f /var/spool/mail/whatever
(I made sure once /var/whatever does not exist).
I wonder, under which circumstances pointing to /dev/null as to such user's home directory is preferable compared to pointing to place that doesn't exist on file system.
I don't know where I picked up a habit pointing to nonexistent place as home directory for such user. I do know though why I type the whole path beginning with leading slash for commands I execute as almighty user root ;-)
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++