[Pkg-shadow-devel] newusers.8 man page and newusers issues

[Nicolas François]

Hello Tomasz,

Regarding your change on the newusers man page and your question on IRC.

You committed:

    This field must contain name of group. When specified an existing
    group name the named user will be added as a new member of this
    group. If specified non-existent non-numerical group name a new
    group will be created.

I propose the following:

    This field must contain a name of group or a numerical group
    identifier. When an existing group is specified, the named user
    will be added as a new member of this group. Otherwise, a new
    group will be created, whose name is pw_gid and whose identifier
    is either pw_gid if a numerical group identifier was specified, or
    a group identifier greater than all the group identifiers already
    used.

    If no groups are specified, newusers will create a group with the
    name of the new user, and the user's id for its group identifier
    (if it is not already used for an existing group; otherwise
    newusers tries the next ones).

While writing this, I found the following issues:
 * The group name can be numerical (if you specify a numerical group
   id, which is not already used)
 * If you add an user whose name is the name of an existing group, and
   do not specify the group in the newusers file, the existing group
   is overwritten. For example:
       bin:pwd:::gecos:home:shell
   Then the id of the 'bin' group will be overwritten.


 * newusers does not support commented lines
 * newusers does not support MD5 passwords
 * newusers does not validate the user's name with check_user_name

Maybe these last points should be specified in the man page.


Kind Regards,
-- 
Nekral