removed old users and group before creating new ones

[tobias-m]

We need to ensure that old users and groups are deleted first, before creating new ones. Otherwise user ids und group ids can conflict.

[0xf10e]

Wouldn't it be more sensible to create new users first?
When you free up UIDs and GIDs the new users or groups may "inherit" files owned by the ones you just removed.
I don't think gaps in the range of IDs to used get filled up. If UIDs 1005 to 1010 are already in use I'd assume when you delete the users with the IDs 1005 and 1009 the next two to be assigned would still be 1011 and 1012.

[tobias-m]

It's not possible to create a user or group if the correspondig id already exists, which might be the case if UID and GID are self defined and not auto assigned. If you worry about inherited files, you can set force during user removal.

[0xf10e]

I wasn't talking about the home directory here but other things in the filesystem, say write access to something in /var/www. userdel -r (used in modules.useradd, as an example for the various user modules) only removes the user's $HOME and their mailspool (see userdel(8)).

[tobias-m]

From my point of view, there should be no files outside of users home folder (talking about non system users) owned by them to prevent your described problem resulting in several other problems. Files inside /var/www are usually owned by the web server (system) user.

[noelmcloughlin]

Hi @tobias-m Can you fix the conflict? thx

[noelmcloughlin]

ping @tobias-m