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Why doesn't the --quiet flag work when running the adduser command?

it flag

So after a few years of this annoying me, I figured it was time to crowd-source.

Why doesn't the --quiet or -q flag work when running adduser commands on Ubuntu? According to the manual and all documentation I could find, it should work, but it doesn't.

The only time this flag should be ignored is if you also have the --debug flag too, which I don't.

So, why doesn't it work? I have tried rearranging the order of command flags (options) too, but still no luck... no matter what I try, if the user exists already, output will be generated like:

adduser: The user 'example' already exists.

In the free script I released, people are constantly getting confused by this message, so I'd really like to hide it.

It should be considered "informational" output according to Ubuntu docs, but clearly the shell believes it's a serious warning/error and doesn't suppress it. Why? And, what is the safest workaround?

Zanna avatar
kr flag
This works for me only if the flag `--system` is used along with `--quiet` and the user that already exists is a system user - as far as I can tell from the manual, that's the only case where it's supposed to work
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