Cannot add user or rebuild password database

Hello everyone.

I've discovered that I can no longer add users on my system, but I don't know when this problem appeared. Adding a user with adduser fails with "User 'username' disappeared during update". I found the following instructions for fixing this, but neither works for me: running vipw and then saving without making any edits, and also running pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd.

I have since discovered that /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passed both had a duplicate "unbound" user and I thought that might be the problem, so I have manually deleted the duplicate from each file.

However, the problem persists. Running pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd either fails with the message "Abort", or sometimes hangs forever.

Oddly, if I copy my /etc/master.passed file to a jail then I can successfully run pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd there. And if I run ezjail-admin update -b or ezjail-admin update -i then it fails when executing the pwd_mkdb ... command.

If I run dmesg, then I see some messages like "pid 30941 (pwd_mkdb), uid 0: exited on signal 6".

Does anybody know what the problem is and how to fix it?

Phew! I've solved this problem for myself. I came across this message in the FreeBSD mailing lists which mentions multiple entries in /etc/shells. My file looked something like this:


This repeated for hundreds of lines.

After removing all duplicate entries, the pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd succeeded and I am now able to add users again.

That should be reported as a bug, the code reading the /etc/shells file should be robust enough to handle such pathological cases.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've reported a bug.