On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 23:41 -0600, Bob Proulx wrote: > Jason Pyeron wrote: > > When a package needs to verify/add a user, what are the proper ways of > > adding users on install and removing them on uninstall? > > > > This question may be vague, if so my apologies for that. > > Proper depends upon the distro for which you are packaging. On some > distros you would use 'useradd' and on others 'adduser'. So with an > equally vague answer, it depends. You have to know your audience. > > Hints: > > * Test that the user does not already exist. Create the user if it > does not. > > * How do you handle NIS/YP? Do you care? LDAP too, and yes you should care. > %pre > > if ! grep -q '^myuser:' /etc/group; then > groupadd -g 26 myuser 2>/dev/null || true > fi > if ! grep -q '^myuser:' /etc/passwd; then > useradd -u 26 -o -g 26 -c Myuser -d /var/myuser -s /bin/false myuser 2>/dev/null || true > fi > > exit 0 A better check that takes into account LDAP/NIS, etc is to use the "gentent" command. Also, best practice is to use the "-r" switch to user/groupadd to create system accounts with low ids. So taking these two suggestions into account, you have: %pre if ! getent group | grep -q myuser; then groupadd -r myuser 2>/dev/null || true fi if ! getent passwd | grep -q myuser; then usreadd -r -g myuser -c Myuser -d /var/myuser -s /bin/false myuser 2>/dev/null || true fi exit 0 Dax Kelson Guru Labs
