Restore Nobody user after deletion

Support
1

Hi everyone! Recent linux-user here.

I deleted the Nobody user, without knowing about its importance. I found a post related to this problem but the information linked there from the archive is lost.

Could anyone help me on how to restore the Nobody user?

Thanks!

2

Add it back with useradd --help.
It should look like this:

/etc/passwd:nobody:x:65534:65534:Nobody:/:/usr/bin/nologin
/etc/group:nobody:x:65534:

So you need to tell useradd to use UID and GID of 65534, shell is /usr/bin/nologin, don’t create home. And that “Nobody” (capital N) field is called GECOS field/comment.

3

from reading
man useradd
I pieced together this command:

useradd --gid 65534 --uid 65534 --no-create-home --shell /usr/bin/nologin Nobody

or perhaps rather this:

useradd --gid 65534 --uid 65534 --no-create-home --shell /usr/bin/nologin nobody

I can’t figure out how to set the GECOS field - but the user name needs to be lowercase “nobody”.

run it with sudo

then check whether /etc/passwd and /etc/group look like @zbe said

4 
-c, --comment COMMENT         GECOS field of the new account

:man_shrugging:
You can probably just ignore this.

5

Thank you!
I’m sure I’m not blind, but being pretty tired may explain me having missed it.

6

Hi, I deleted mine from the UI w/o knowing its important. I tried restoring it using the useradd above but I am getting : useradd: user ‘nobody’ already exists. I am having no issues so far other than the fact the user is gone.