Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-packaging (134 mails)

[Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Heya,


some packages in the openSUSE distribution do this (or equivalent) in 
their %post section:

        %post
        getent passwd user >/dev/null || useradd user || :

darix says this is against policy (what a killer argument), but closely 
looking at what is happening, getent is just what is desired. 

If getent were not used, useradd would throw a warning whenever the user 
already exists, which would be the case on all upgrade attempts of such 
packages. So people slap in

        useradd user 2>/dev/null || :

instead, but that hides real errors that do not stem from a preexisting 
user. So, with getent, one can check whether the user already exists and 
not call useradd if so; otherwise do create the user, and NOT drop any 
stderr messages.
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