Re: usermod and systemd

[Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org>]

Am 2015-03-11 11:31, schrieb Martin Read:
> On 11/03/15 02:49, Roberto De Oliveira wrote:
> > I have a weird behavior on my system, I'm trying to change a home
> > directory with "usermod -d newhome foo" but the system denies because
> > "usermod: user foo is currently used by process XXXX", when I look for
> > PID XXXX I see "/lib/systemd/systemd --user". Does anyone knows why 
> > this
> > is happening? How I fix it?
>
> That process is a session instance of systemd, which (in general)
> indicates that the user in question is logged in to the system.
> usermod would appear to be (quite rightly, IMO!) refusing to change a
> user's home directory while that user is logged in.
>
> I would expect that you can resolve this by closing all of that user's
> login sessions before changing their home directory.

Either the user is still logged in, or there is still a process running 
from a previous login session, which keeps the systemd --user instance 
active.

Please check with ps, if you have any such processes belonging to that 
user. If you stop them, the systemd --user instance should go away.

"loginctl lists-sessions" will tell you about active logind sessions.
"loginctl user-status <username>" will give you more information about 
active sessions (including processes) for a given user
"systemd-cgls" can be used to inspect the process tree. If you look for 
a user-<uid>.slice, it show your systemd-user instance and the existing 
session scopes.


HTH,
Michael