Hi,
On Fri, Aug 29, 2025 at 09:10:15PM -0500, Rob Browning wrote:
Offhand, and without remembering perl's exact semantics on this front,
I'd guess this is a case of assuming paths are decodable in the current
locale. If so, it should be possible to reproduce the problem from a
UTF-8 locale like this:
touch /any/where/not-utf-8-but-possible-$'\177'
deluser --remove-all-files someuser
Here the equivalent eventually fails to remove /home/someuser,
reporting:
invalid characters in input string, see trace output for more details
at /usr/share/perl5/Debian/AdduserCommon.pm line 143.
That worked for me in an nspawn container with en_US.UTF-8 locale:
| root@salida-sid-buildd-amd64-08lb:/srv# LANG=en_US.UTF-8
| root@salida-sid-buildd-amd64-08lb:/srv# locale
| LANG=en_US.UTF-8
| LANGUAGE=
| LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
| LC_ALL=
| root@salida-sid-buildd-amd64-08lb:/srv# adduser --disabled-password
--comment="blubb" blubb
| root@salida-sid-buildd-amd64-08lb:/srv# touch
/var/lib/not-utf-8-but-possible-$'\177'
| root@salida-sid-buildd-amd64-08lb:/srv# ls -al /var/lib/ /home
| /home:
| total 12
| drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug 31 12:19 .
| drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4096 Dec 7 2023 ..
| drwx------ 2 blubb blubb 4096 Aug 31 12:19 blubb
|
| /var/lib/:
| total 36
| drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 Aug 31 12:18 .
| drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Apr 19 2024 ..
| drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Aug 31 12:17 apt
| drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Aug 31 12:17 dpkg
| drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 11 2023 misc
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 31 12:19 'not-utf-8-but-possible-'$'\177'
| drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 30 08:01 pam
| drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 5 2025 python
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 84 Aug 14 18:28 shells.state
| drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 7 2023 systemd
| root@salida-sid-buildd-amd64-08lb:/srv# deluser --remove-all-files blubb
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/lib64', it matches ^/lib.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/lib', it matches ^/lib.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/sbin', it matches ^/sbin$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/bin', it matches ^/bin$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/var', it matches ^/var$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/media', it matches ^/media$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/usr', it matches ^/usr$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/run', it matches ^/run$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/srv', it matches ^/srv$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/sys', it is a mount point.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/opt', it matches ^/opt$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/mnt', it matches ^/mnt$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/tmp', it matches ^/tmp$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/proc', it is a mount point.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/root', it matches ^/root$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/dev', it matches ^/dev$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/etc', it matches ^/etc$.
| warn: Not backing up/removing `/boot', it matches ^/boot$.
| warn: `/usr/bin/crontab' not executed. Skipping crontab removal. Package
`cron' required.
| root@salida-sid-buildd-amd64-08lb:/srv# ls -al /var/lib/ /home
| /home:
| total 8
| drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 31 12:19 .
| drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4096 Dec 7 2023 ..
|
| /var/lib/:
| total 36
| drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 Aug 31 12:18 .
| drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Apr 19 2024 ..
| drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Aug 31 12:17 apt
| drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Aug 31 12:17 dpkg
| drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 11 2023 misc
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Aug 31 12:19 'not-utf-8-but-possible-'$'\177'
| drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 30 08:01 pam
| drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 5 2025 python
| -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 84 Aug 14 18:28 shells.state
| drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 7 2023 systemd
| root@salida-sid-buildd-amd64-08lb:/srv# dpkg --list adduser
| Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
| |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
| ||/ Name Version Architecture Description
| +++-==============-============-============-=================================
| ii adduser 3.152 all add and remove users and groups
| root@salida-sid-buildd-amd64-08lb:/srv#
Can you give a better reproducer maybe?
Though it doesn't actually indicate there was trouble in the exit
status, i.e. the exit status was 0.
(I had a path like that in a different user's $HOME, leftover from
running some bup tests for this kind of thing.)
So, the file in question does not even need to belong to the user being
deleted, and the issue stops the file system walk, leaving other files
undeleted?
Greetings
Marc
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