UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have logged into a box with some userid,but in this box der is no entry for this userid in /etc/passwd file.this box is used by multiple users but none of them have their enteries in passwd file but for each user there is a directory in /home

like for user1 /home/user1
for user2 /home/user2
etc

also in passwd file there is entry only for some sudo users.

can someone elaborate what type of system arrangement is this?

Curious. ls -l /home/user1, who owns it?

This can happen when users on two systems, one nfs-mounting a partition on the other, disagree on what users are what ID's. Files with userid's that don't exist can be created. Nothing wrong with that in a sense, since nothing explodes, but the owner will only show up as numbers.

It can also happen when a userid's deleted but their files remain. Or a restore-from-backup where you restore files for users which haven't been created yet. And other such situations where files created by users that no longer exist are created anyway.

If /home/user1 is owned by some known userid that's not user1, then I'm not sure what's going on.

/home/usre1 file is owned by user1 only.
each user has exclusive access to there directories.

If you see that /home/user1 is owned by user1 in ls -ld, even though there's no user1 in /etc/passwd, then your system must be getting user information somewhere else. Perhaps LDAP.

Hi jcpratap,

Can you post the output of;

Code:

logins -oux

Regards

Dave

Code:

 
 
logins -oux

is giving command not found.

Also can someone elaborate about LDAP.