adduser - gid error?

[Anton Shterenlikht]

>On Friday, 04. Dec 2015, 03:04:55 -0800, Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
>> For the user I added today I got:
>> 
>> newuser:*:1004:4294967295: ...
>> 
>> Does this look right?
>
>4294967295 is obviously 0xffffffff in hexadecimal and -1 if
>seen as a signed value what is commonly used in C as a
>return value to indicate an error.
>
>> pw: gid `4294967295' has already been allocated
>> adduser: ERROR: There was an error adding user (newuser).
>
>"adduser" is a shell script. I had a look at it but I don't
>know how you managed to generate that number. The script
>calls "pw", that is written in C and probably cannot
>increment the maximum 32-bit value.

# pw useradd newuser
pw: gid `4294967295' has already been allocated
#

Now I'm worried...

>> What shall I do?
>
>Untested: You should be save by editing /etc/groups and change
>the value by hand. Then call "vipw" to edit /etc/passwd.
>After that you need to find files on disk with the wrong
>group id. You can do something like
>
>  # find /home /var -group 4294967295 -exec ls -l '{}' \; 
>  # find /home /var -group 4294967295 -exec chgrp 1004 '{}' \; 
>
>Did I forget anything?

I'll give it a go if all else fails,
but I worry that my system is not right.

Thanks

Anton