Account with conflicting name exists locally

I was installing Docker CE on Red Hat.

I tried to add myself to the docker group

#-> usermod -aG docker sid

but got an error that the user does not exist. Not sure why I got this error in the first place. But anyway I did

#-> adduser sid

I did get this message when I ran above command

adduser: warning: the home directory already exists.
Not copying any file from skel directory into it.

The usermod worked after that. But now when I ssh into the machine, I get this warning which does not look nice.

Account with conflicting name (sid) exists locally

Can anyone explain what is going on and how to fix it? This link is saying to kill all processes owned by sid and I am not sure if that is the right solution.

Additional information in case its helpful. I can see

#-> grep sid /etc/group
docker:x:500:cht_agent,sid
sid:x:502:
#-> grep sid /etc/passwd
sid:x:502:502::/home/sid:/bin/bash

1 Answer

The solution is to manually delete the user from /etc/passwd which is a directory of local users in the system. So delete (requires root privileges):

sid:x:502:502::/home/sid:/bin/bash