This option can be used to set a separate mode for useradd(8) and
newusers(8) to create the home directories with.
If this option is not set, the current behavior of using UMASK
or the default umask is preserved.
There are many distributions that set UMASK to 077 by default just
to create home directories not readable by others and use things like
/etc/profile, bashrc or sudo configuration files to set a less
restrictive
umask. This has always resulted in bug reports because it is hard
to follow as users tend to change files like bashrc and are not about
setting the umask to counteract the umask set in /etc/login.defs.
A recent change in sudo has also resulted in many bug reports about
this. sudo now tries to respect the umask set by pam modules and on
systems where pam does not set a umask, the login.defs UMASK value is
used.
The content of the man pages however is dependent on compile flags. So the
pre-built ones might not fit your version of shadow. To build them yourself use
--enable-man. Furthermore the following build requirements will be needed:
a847899b52