I initially added a user (adduser MYUSER
) and then deleted it (deluser MYUSER
). Now I'm trying to add it again (adduser MYUSER
) and I get the following message:
adduser: The group 'MYUSER' already exists.
When I checked, the group does indeed exist. So, I assume I would need to delete the group (groupdel MYUSER
), but this happens:
groupdel: cannot remove the primary group of user 'debian'
Best Answer
adduser
creates a dedicated primary group for each user, with the same name as the user. (It can be configured differently, but evidently it is configured to do this on your system. This is the default configuration.) Runningdeluser
deletes the user but not their primary group, even if the group was added byadduser
and had no other members.If you want the user to use the existing group as its primary group, pass the option
--ingroup MYSER
toadduser
.