Following a freebsd-update upgrade from 9.1-RELEASE to 9.2-RELEASE, the next attempt to run "pw useradd foo" is met with this error: pw: user 'foo' disappeared during update I do not see this on machines on which I installed 9.2-RELEASE directly from media. At this point the state of user 'foo' is inconsistent: [jayb@hungo ~]$ sudo pw useradd foo pw: user 'foo' already exists [jayb@hungo ~]$ sudo pw usershow foo pw: no such user `foo' [jayb@hungo ~]$ sudo pw userdel foo pw: no such user `foo' [jayb@hungo ~]$ Fix: I do not know how to fix, i.e. to stop causing the problem. Once the situation has developed, the condition can be resolved by running vipw(8) to delete the user foo. At this point the next attempt to run "pw useradd foo" succeeds. How-To-Repeat: Start with a 9.1-RELEASE system, upgrade it to 9.2-RELEASE using "sudo freebsd-update -r 9.2-RELEASE upgrade" and following the instructions. It appears that at this point, the next attempt to use pw to add a user will fail, even if that attempt is being done by adding a new port that creates a user, e.g. postfix. I categorized this as "serious" since it is a latent problem that breaks installation of otherwise valid ports.
I believe with all recent changes in pw(8) this has been fixed as a side effect At least I cannot reproduce