Had something similiar happen, if you take a look at your passwd/shadow/group files (which are likely .5 MB or more in size now) you'll see tons of junk and lots of commas... I think I ended up fixing this mostly via sed/grep and by hand... Can't remember what caused it though... Cheers, MaZe. On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Les Mikesell wrote: > I've been copying old passwd/shadow/group files from system to system > for ages across different distributions/updates and would like to > get them back in sync with each other so the system tools will > work. Now they hang like: > > #userdel irose > hangs forever, syslog says: > Jul 12 11:19:32 newftp userdel[30335]: delete user `irose' > Jul 12 11:19:32 newftp userdel[30335]: delete `irose' from group `ftp' > Jul 12 11:20:02 newftp last message repeated 373404 times > Jul 12 11:21:04 newftp last message repeated 646597 times > Jul 12 11:21:06 newftp last message repeated 29123 times > > Is there some kind of test/diagnostic tool I can use to clean up > the parts that don't match anymore? Preferably one that doesn't > hang forever when something is missing.... > >