Poor diagnostic when run by a non privileged user

[grofaty]

In Terminal executing command:
userdel -r user_name

Returns error:
userdel: unable to lock password file

This error is practically useless for non-geek user. The user does not have the privilege, so executing:
sudo userdel -r user_name
deletes the user.

I suggest to use more descriptive error message like: "User 'xxxxx' does not have permissions to delete user 'yyyy'".

[Vish (vish)]

Thank you for bringing this bug to our attention. However, a paper cut should be a small usability issue, in the default Ubuntu install, that affects many people and is quick and easy to fix. So this bug can't be addressed as part of this project.

- we do not expect average users to use the terminal , Hence not a papercut.
For further information about papercuts criteria, please read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut.

Don't worry though, this bug has been marked as "Invalid" only in the papercuts project.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

that's not a gnome-terminal issue.

[Nicolas François (nicolas-francois)]

shadow uses lckpwdf / ulckpwdf to cooperatively lock the files.

These APIs do not provide any information on why a lock could not be received.

Since the locking issue can be caused by other issues than lack of priviledges, I don't think the proposed change would be valid.