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PASSWD(5) Linux Programmer's Manual PASSWD(5)
NAME
passwd - password file
DESCRIPTION
Passwd is a text file, that contains a list of the system's accounts,
giving for each account some useful information like user ID, group ID,
home directory, shell, etc. Often, it also contains the encrypted
passwords for each account. It should have general read permission
(many utilities, like ls(1) use it to map user IDs to user names), but
write access only for the superuser.
In the good old days there was no great problem with this general read
permission. Everybody could read the encrypted passwords, but the
hardware was too slow to crack a well-chosen password, and moreover,
the basic assumption used to be that of a friendly user-community.
These days many people run some version of the shadow password suite,
where /etc/passwd has *'s instead of encrypted passwords, and the
encrypted passwords are in /etc/shadow which is readable by the supe-
ruser only.
Regardless of whether shadow passwords are used, many sysadmins use a
star in the encrypted password field to make sure that this user can
not authenticate him- or herself using a password. (But see the Notes
below.)
If you create a new login, first put a star in the password field, then
use passwd(1) to set it.
There is one entry per line, and each line has the format:
account:password:UID:GID:GECOS:directory:shell
The field descriptions are:
account the name of the user on the system. It should not
contain capital letters.
password the encrypted user password or a star.
UID the numerical user ID.
GID the numerical primary group ID for this user.
GECOS This field is optional and only used for informational
purposes. Usually, it contains the full user name.
GECOS means General Electric Comprehensive Operating
System, which has been renamed to GCOS when GE's large
systems division was sold to Honeywell. Dennis
Ritchie has reported: "Sometimes we sent printer out-
put or batch jobs to the GCOS machine. The gcos field
in the password file was a place to stash the informa-
tion for the $IDENTcard. Not elegant."
directory the user's $HOME directory.
shell the program to run at login (if empty, use /bin/sh).
If set to a non-existing executable, the user will be
unable to login through login(1).
NOTE
If you want to create user groups, their GIDs must be equal and there
must be an entry in /etc/group, or no group will exist.
If the encrypted password is set to a star, the user will be unable to
login using login(1), but may still login using rlogin(1), run existing
processes and initiate new ones through rsh(1), cron(1), at(1), or mail
filters, etc. Trying to lock an account by simply changing the shell
field yields the same result and additionally allows the use of su(1).
FILES
/etc/passwd
SEE ALSO
login(1), passwd(1), su(1), group(5), shadow(5)
File formats 1998-01-05 PASSWD(5)
Man(1) output converted with
man2html and wrapped by fishsponge
This page was generated on Tue Feb 13 02:22:07 GMT 2007
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