potential error with adduser

[Laurent Bercot]

>I was more or less surprised by the fact that the default method was
>to put false information in the passwd file and was clarifying if this
>was appropriate.  As I've stated numerous times, I can't see a
>circumstance where this would be advised.

  It's very traditional to put nonsense information in /etc/passwd in the
fields where that information is irrelevant or non-applicable.
For instance, for a system account, you often have a meaningless gecos,
an "x" password, and /nonexistent (some people prefer /bin/false) as 
login
shell, since nobody's ever supposed to log in as those users. The idea
is to make the login process instantly fail, or the information 
retrieval
process obviously show that something went wrong and that information
wasn't even supposed to be retrieved.

--
  Laurent