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How to manage a user account on SLES that does, and does not, exist?

mx flag

My team (software devs) has a VM we use for testing. We agreed to self-admin the server in order to have root access. Despite us being devs and not admins, it's worked really well for us, but today I ran into an oddity I've never seen before. I don't even know what to search for to find a fix.

I sudo'd and tried to add a user account named builder:

# useradd builder
useradd: user 'builder' already exists
# userdel builder
userdel: user 'builder' does not exist
# grep builder /etc/passwd
# su -s builder
su: failed to execute builder: No such file or directory
# cat /etc/os-release
NAME="SLES"
VERSION="15-SP4"
VERSION_ID="15.4"
PRETTY_NAME="SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4"
ID="sles"
ID_LIKE="suse"
ANSI_COLOR="0;32"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:suse:sles:15:sp4"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://documentation.suse.com/"
#

As you might guess, there is no home directory for user builder.

Other accounts we created are represented in /etc/passwd.

How do I get to a state where we can login to and use the builder account?

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

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