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 peo-
ple 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 superuser only.
Regardless of whether shadow passwords are used, many sysad-
mins 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 output or batch jobs to the GCOS
machine. The gcos field in the password file
was a place to stash the information 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 execut-
able, 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) or cron(1) or 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
passwd(1), login(1), su(1), group(5), shadow(5)