Comment 1 for bug 936762

Digging in to this a bit, I think the bug can be said to be in the lxc templates, where lxc-ubuntu has

do_bindhome()
{
    rootfs=$1
    user=$2

    # copy /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/group entries into container
    pwd=`getent passwd $user`
    if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        echo 'Warning: failed to copy password entry for $user'
 return
    else
        echo $pwd >> $rootfs/etc/passwd
    fi
    shad=`getent shadow $user`
    echo $shad >> $rootfs/etc/shadow

    # bind-mount the user's path into the container's /home
    h=`getent passwd $user | cut -d: -f 6`
    mkdir -p $rootfs/$h
    echo "$h $rootfs/$h none bind 0 0" >> $path/fstab
}

so that copies the pwent, including the shell, with no consideration whether it will exist....