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 usernames), 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 "x" instead of encrypted passwords, and the
encrypted passwords are in /etc/shadow which is readable by the supe‐
ruser only.
If the encrypted password, whether in /etc/passwd or in /etc/shadow, is
an empty string, login is allowed without even asking for a password.
Note that this functionality may be intentionally disabled in applica‐
tions, or configurable (for example using the "nullok" or "nonull"
arguments to pam_unix.so).
If the encrypted password in /etc/passwd is "*NP*" (without the
quotes), the shadow record should be obtained from a NIS+ server.
Regardless of whether shadow passwords are used, many sysadmins use an
asterisk 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 an asterisk 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, an asterisk (*), or the
letter 'x'. (See pwconv(8) for an explanation of
'x'.)
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 username.
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).
FILES
/etc/passwd
NOTES
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 an asterisk, 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(8),
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).
SEE ALSOlogin(1), passwd(1), su(1), getpwent(3), getpwnam(3), group(5),
shadow(5)COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.22 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
Linux 1998-01-05 PASSWD(5)
