[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#865762: useradd: empty shell by default ($SHELL in /etc/default/useradd not taken into account)

[Baptiste Jonglez]

Package: passwd
Version: 1:4.4-4.1
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

Dear Maintainer,

When creating a new user with `useradd`, no shell is defined for the new user:

    # useradd foo
    # cat /etc/passwd
    foo:x:1447:1447::/home/foo:

This is a regression from earlier versions of Debian, including jessie, which
have the correct behaviour:

    jessie# useradd foo
    jessie# cat /etc/passwd
    foo:x:1447:1447::/home/foo:/bin/sh

According to `man useradd`, the default value of the shell is supposed to be
taken from `/etc/default/useradd`.  This is indeed the case on jessie and earlier.

There is a patch for this issue upstream: https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/commit/507f96cdeb54079fb636c7ce21e371f7a16a520e
At least Arch Linux and NixOS have already integrated this patch.

Thanks,
Baptiste

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages passwd depends on:
ii  libaudit1       1:2.6.7-2
ii  libc6           2.24-11
ii  libpam-modules  1.1.8-3.6
ii  libpam0g        1.1.8-3.6
ii  libselinux1     2.6-3+b1
ii  libsemanage1    2.6-2

passwd recommends no packages.

passwd suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information