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 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++