Let's say I have a user called panos and he has his home directory located at /home/panos
. Then, I create a another user called Tom:
adduser Tom
It creates a user Tom who has home dir: /home/Tom
The question is: what if I would like to create a new user and give him as home dir the home dir of another user. For example, let's create the user Jerry and pass him as his home dir the home dir of user Panos:
adduser -d /home/panos Jerry
but there's an error saying:
adduser: warning: the home directory already exists.
Not copying any file from skel directory into it.
However, if you take a look at the /etc/passwd
file:
tail -n 3 /etc/passwd
anthony:x:501:501::/home/anthony:/bin/bash
panos:x:502:502::/home/panos:/bin/bash
Jerry:x:503:503::/home/panos:/bin/bash
it seems it worked. But when I tried to log in as Jerry:
[root@LinuxAcademy ~]# su Jerry
bash-4.1$ bash: /home/panos/.bashrc: Permission denied
bash-4.1$
it prevents me from loggin in as Jerry and it also changes my prompt (the PS1).
So, how can I do this? Is it possible?
Best Answer
You did create a user with a home directory that already exists.
This isn't an error, it's a warning. Usually, the reason not to create a home directory is for a user whose home directory isn't supposed to exist. Here, it does, which has a high chance of being an error by the system administrator (e.g. a bad copy-paste or a buggy script). Since you really meant to use an existing home directory, ignore this warning.
You did log in as Jerry. That bash 4.1 is running as Jerry. Jerry doesn't have the permission to read his
~/.bashrc
, either because the file.bashrc
is only readable topanos
(and perhaps to a group that Jerry doesn't belong to), or because the directory/home/panos
itself is not accessible (x
permission) to Jerry. So bash tells you that it can't read its startup file, and it displays its default prompt.Having multiple users with the same home directory is very unusual (excluding system accounts whose home directory doesn't matter). What you should do about permissions depends what you're trying to achieve by this. You probably do want to at least allow all these users to read their home directory.