useradd fails

[Brad Marks]

When I execute this command:
useradd -g users -d /home/users -s /bin/sh -c test x.xxx
I get this error:
'/home/users' is not a valid directory

What could be invalid about /home/users?

Thanks,
Brad

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Brad,

Does it exist prior to the command?
If not then you need a -m to "make" it.

HTH,
Jeff

[Brad Marks]

Jeff,
Yes it does.
Further, I found that if i add a trailing "/"; making it "-d /home/users/" it works, except the ownership of /home/users changes from root:sys to the user being added (in this case x.xxx:users)!?

[hari jayaram_1]

Hi,

I just tried that on a test server and it works perfectly fine. I had to later create the directory. Please advice if the directory is already there and also if you are doing it with sufficient priveleges.

Thanks

[Sundar_7]

I dont believe you will get an invalid directory message even if the directory exists already.

[Jeff Schussele]

OK - what is the ownership & perms of /home?
A clueless admin doing chown username:groupname .* inside a user's home dir can change the ownership of /home& that can result in these symptoms.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Brad Marks]

The /home/users directory already exists:
drwxrwxrwx 2 root users 96 May 10 16:07 .
drwxrwxrwx 32 root root 1024 May 4 11:18 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root users 893 May 10 13:42 .profile

[Jairo Campana · Accepted solution]

useradd -g users -d /home/users -s /bin/sh -c test x.xxx

error '/home/users' is not a valid directory
the comamd some times the directory does not create

in my case

made mkdiir /home/users or option:

-m Creates the home directory for the new login if it
does not exist. If the home directory exists, the
directory must have read and execute permission by
group, where group is the primary group of the new
login.

[Brad Marks]

It seems that the group ownership of /home/users needs to be 'users'.
This fixed it.

Thanks to all!
Brad

[Bill Hassell]

The permissions on /home and /home/users are very wrong. They should be 755 (drwxr-xr-x). Do you have umask set? If not, you will have to fix all the directories and files created since the original installation. umask is critical for the root user and should be 022 or even 077.