Arch Linux - Failed to start Verify integrity of password and group files

The shadow.service unit reported that it had failed and threw the following error message: “user ‘colord’: directory ‘/var/lib/colord’ does not exist”. I had no recollection of housing such a user, but by issuing the command below there was hard proof (image to the right) that colord was indeed a homeless user on my system, and her home was supposed to have been /var/lib/colord.

cat /etc/passwd | grep colord

Asking pacman about the colord package returned the following information:

Repository  : extra
Name        : colord
Version     : 1.2.9-2
Description : System daemon for managing color devices

I’m guessing colord got installed as a dependency of some software I was previously using, but was later removed due to being an unneeded dependency. For some reason the removal of the package had left the user account on the system while its home folder got purged.

To solve the issue I simply deleted the colord user and started the shadow.service unit using the following commands:

userdel -r colord
systemctl start shadow.service

All in a day’s work ;-)