Re: Why do UID values of system users matter?
On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 11:03:48PM -0400, Kenneth Parker wrote:
> >From looking at an Ubuntu 16.04 System I administer, User "man" (uid 6) is,
> apparently the owner of /var/cache/man, which appears to be an area for
> translating man pages. Who creates this User?
I don't know about Ubuntu, because this is debian-user. In Debian,
the preinst script for the base-passwd package will create a bunch
of system users if /etc/passwd is not present, and groups if /etc/group
is not present.
See /var/lib/dpkg/info/base-passwd.preinst for details.
One might ponder under what conditions, exactly, this script would be
executed while these files are not yet present. I don't know the inner
workings of the debian-installer, so I'm not sure whether this is just
a safety net, or an expected part of a normal system installation.
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