Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 143150
adding user with existing home dir overwrites dot files
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:15 EST
Description of problem: Where's my .bashrc?!! When I install RHEL4 Beta 2, and mount an existing partition to /home, I can add a username during firstboot who already has a directory... however the useradd that is performed overwrites that user's ~/.bashrc (and other) files. Can't there be some logic to detect if those files already exist, and not overwrite them? It may be easier to just not do anything related to creating/populating home dirs if said user's home directory already exists. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): RHEL 4 Beta 2
The easiest fix here is to just not allow you to create a user if a home directory by the same name already exists. useradd doesn't have any options to only copy files from /etc/skel that don't already exist in the home directory. The best I can do there is to bounce the bug to the appropriate package and ask for such an option. I don't want to duplicate the skel handling code inside firstboot. Adding to the proposed list with the suggestion that we error if a home directory with the same name as the created user already exists.
This is fixed in Rawhide and will be fixed in the next major release of RHEL.
Sweet, thank you Red Hat.