[Adduser-devel] Bug#723572: adduser: Invoking adduser twice with the same parameters yields exit status 1 for non system users.

[micke at openend.se]

Package: adduser
Version: 3.113+nmu3
Severity: normal

The adduser man page says this about exit status:
EXIT VALUES
       0      The user exists as specified. This can have  2  causes:  The
              user  was created by adduser or the user was already present
              on the system before adduser was  invoked.  If  adduser  was
              returning  0  , invoking adduser a second time with the same
              parameters as before also returns 0.

However, running the command twice with the same parameters for a non system
user will yield exit code 1:

# adduser foo --disabled-password --gecos foobar
Adding user `foo' ...
Adding new group `foo' (1000) ...
Adding new user `foo' (1000) with group `foo' ...
Creating home directory `/home/foo' ...
Copying files from `/etc/skel' ...
# adduser foo --disabled-password --gecos foobar
adduser: The user `foo' already exists.
# echo $?
1



-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'stable'), (700, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.10-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages adduser depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.51
ii  passwd                 1:4.1.5.1-1
ii  perl-base              5.18.1-3

adduser recommends no packages.

Versions of packages adduser suggests:
ii  liblocale-gettext-perl  1.05-7+b2
ii  perl-modules            5.18.1-3

-- debconf information:
* adduser/homedir-permission: true
  adduser/title: