bash - useradd denies home directory creation Ubuntu 13.04

07
2014-07

ehime

I'm trying to set up a git user, but am getting the error

useradd: cannot create directory /srv/data/git when running this command

sudo useradd                      \
  --create-home                   \
  --skel      /dev/null           \
  --home-dir  /srv/data/git       \
  --shell     /usr/bin/git-shell  \
  --comment   'Web Archive VCS'   \
git

Why am I having trouble? When creating the directory first, (mkdir -p /srv/data/git) I receive the following two errors/warnings.

useradd: warning: the home directory already exists.
Not copying any file from skel directory into it.

This should be very straight forward, but is having issues for unknown reasons to me

Answers

ehime

It looks like useradd uses mkdir or something akin to if WITHOUT the -p flag, this means that the directory MUST exist up to the last portion of the path. This seems like a functionality gap.

In order to fix the above, I/you will need to mkdir -p /srv/data before running the switch for ... --create-dir --home-dir /src/data/git ...

Related Question

Disable specific git commands in a particular repository?

git

benizi

Three times recently, I've done really stupid things while using git. Twice I've run git reset --hard on my home-directory repository. The first time I fat-fingered a reverse-history search in my shell (didn't mean to run it at all), and the second time I was in the wrong terminal window (meant to reset a different repo). The other mistake was running git push --mirror ssh://remote-machine/ from the wrong repository.

git help config informs me that "To avoid confusion and troubles with script usage, aliases that hide existing git commands are ignored.", so my .git/config aliases

[alias]
reset = "!echo no"
push = "!echo wrong repo"

are ignored. Is there a way to do this simply? I'll likely write a wrapper script of some sort and alias git=wrapped-git in my shell, but I was hoping there'd be a simpler way to do it.

Update: using the following, based on grawity's answer, but taking advantage of git's built-in configuration system. This avoids grep'ing an ad-hoc file, and it allows for "cascading" (~/.gitconfig disables 'reset' globally, but per-repo .git/config enables it). In my .zshrc:

git () {
    local disabled=$(command git config --bool disabled.$1 2>/dev/null)
    if ${disabled:-false} ; then
        echo "The $1 command is intentionally disabled" >&2
        return 1
    fi
    command git "$@"
}

Related Answers

Alois Mahdal

Not exactly a wrapper script – you can create a shell function:

git() {
    local gitdir=$(git rev-parse --git-dir 2>/dev/null)
    if [[ $gitdir && -f $gitdir/disabled-commands ]]; then
        # "disabled-commands" should contain "push", "reset", etc
        if grep -Fwqse "$1" "$gitdir/disabled-commands"; then
            echo "You have disabled this command." >&2
            return 1
        else
            command git "$@"
        fi
    else
        command git "$@"
    fi
}

There isn't a simpler way than that.

Edit: Added -e to grep: without it, grep interfered with calls like git --version, which became grep -Fwqs --version, and also with tab completion features.

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bash - useradd denies home directory creation Ubuntu 13.04