“Failed to create user” due to regular expression error

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 12.10 desktop 32 bit. Currently I have only a user, type administrator. I'd like to create another administrator user but I keep getting the following error:

Failed to create user

GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.Accounts.Error.Failed: running '/usr/sbin/adduser' failed: /usr/sbin/adduser returned an error (1): adduser: Please enter a username matching the regular expression configured via the NAME_REGEX[_SYSTEM] configuration variable. Use the `--force-badname' option to relax this check or reconfigure NAME_REGEX.

Any suggestion is appreciated.

Answer 1

You normally get this message if you are trying to create a user with a name that contains characters that are considered to be un acceptable as per your NAME_REGEX file. You can try again changing the username with the GUI or you can relax the check by using the command line with the following command.

sudo adduser --force-badname <username>

and then if you want to add the user to the sudo group run the following command.

sudo adduser <username> sudo

Answer 2

The username you're entering contains bad characters. Try entering a simple username containing only lower-case English letters - daniel is good, &&Daniel <*> Johnson## is not so good.