Hello.

When migrating some servers, I took the time to purge my LDAP of old and unused users.

My problem is that the setfacl fails in the middle with “Invalid argument in line 13” because I did the ACLs backup before removing old entries from the LDAP.

It could be great to have options to manage unkown users and groups.

Step to reproduce:

1. add user “foo”: adduser --disabled-login --gecos 'Foo Name,,,,' foo
2. create a file /srv/test: touch /srv/test
3. add some ACL for user “foo” on that file: setfacl -m user:foo:rw /srv/test
4. backup the acl: getfacl /srv/test > /tmp/acls.backup
5. remove the “foo” user: userdel -r foo
6. try to restore the ACLs: cd / && setfacl --restore /tmp/acls.backup

This produce the following error:

    setfacl: /tmp/acls.backup: Invalid argument in line 5

This works when doing the backup with the “--numeric” option, in which case there is no need to resolve the name.

Is it possible to add options like “--unkown-user” and “--unkown-group”? I see 3 useful option value:

- “abort”: the default to be compatible with actual behaviour, exit with an error (maybe a better logging message?)
- “ignore”: skip this ACL entry with a warning message
- “<name>” (or “<ID>”): resolve the name to its ID (or use the ID directly) and replace all unknown names with this, abort if the proposed name is unknown

Regards.