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 asterisks (*) 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 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 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 nonexistent 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  chang-
       ing the shell field yields the same result and additionally allows the use of su(1).

SEE ALSO

       login(1), passwd(1), su(1), getpwent(3), getpwnam(3), group(5), shadow(5)

COLOPHON

       This  page is part of release 3.25 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)