adduser: Specify only one name in this mode

Question

I'm trying to add a user with this command on my debian server:

#!/bin/bash

APPUSER="test1"
APPGROUP="test2"

# User
adduser -c 'uwsgi user' --group $APPGROUP --system --no-create-home --disabled-login --disabled-password $APPUSER

However it tells me I can only specify one name, but I am only specifying one name as far as I can see.

What's going wrong?

Solution

Option --group doesn't support any arguments unless you intend to create the given group. But it seems like you cannot add a new user and a (different) new group at the same time.

What are you trying to do? Are you looking for option --ingroup instead? Otherwise you have to create the group first. Then run adduser a second time to add a new user to the existing group.

Comments

[Admin]

What's your OS? adduser varies by OS and even distro.

[Admin]

I should have noticed the Debian tag.

[Admin]

Try running the script using set -x. It should show you the complete command that gets run.