Alistair Crooks <agc@pkgsrc.org> writes:

> Well, if the directory does not exist, and you didn't ask it to make the
> directory, useradd(8) considers that a whinable offence.

Normally I see that.  But I'm trying to replicate a line from
src/etc/master.passwd, which explicitly uses a nonexistent directory,
and I'd like to do that without emitting an error message.

> By default, the password is set to '*'.  Or is it 13 '*'?  I can't
> remember now, it's been a while. Whatever, it's not a valid value
> that a password will hash to.

It's 13 x '*', which is a) not what's checked in to
src/etc/master.passwd for system accounts and b) I prefer a single *.
I concur that both of these are not in the range of the hashes.

No big deal, of course, but these would be minor steps on the way to
automatically adding the new users at upgrade time.  Really the
password file should be a directory, with each line in a file to make
this easier, but then I suppose we'd be Plan 9.
I see the value of staying consistent with Solaris, but I'm not sure
new options that are not used by pkgsrc but only by the NetBSD install
would hurt that much.

Perhaps an option to take a whole line and add it verbatim would solve
all these issues relatively cleanly.

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>