Re: [gentoo-dev] How to force homedir on enewuser

[Mike Frysinger]

On Friday 18 January 2008, Marius Mauch wrote:
> "Hanno Böck" <hanno@g.o> wrote:
> > What is the correct way to handle this? I'd suggest that enewuser might
> > get some "force"-parameter that tells it to delete and recreate the user
> > if it already exists. Thoughts?
>
> Tell the user to do it manually in pkg_setup/postinst. This is
> something that IMO shouldn't be done by the ebuild/package manager for
> two reasons:
> - extreme cornercase, or how often does this come up?
> - the system might rely on the current settings in unexpected ways

right, there is no way (by design) to force these settings on an already 
created user.  if the old path really truly should not be the old value, you 
can do something like this in pkg_setup:
if [[ $(egetent passwd user | cut -d: -f6) == "/the/old/path" ]] ; then
	eerror "please run usermod -m -d /new/path ......"
	die "moocow"
fi
-mike