Table of Contentspasswd - password file Passwd is an ASCII file which contains a list of the system's users and the passwords they must use for access. The password file should have read access for everyone, which is ok because of the encryption, but write access only for the superuser. If you create a new login, leave the password field empty and use passwd(2) to fill it. A star or something like that in the password field means, that this user can not login via login(1). If your root file system is on /dev/ram, you must save a changed password file to your root file system floppy, before you shutdown the system and check the access rights. If you want to create user groups, their GID's must be equal and there must be an entry in /etc/group, or no group will exist. There is one entry per line, and each line has the format:
login_name:passwd:GID:UID:user_name:directory:shell
The field descriptions are:
- login_name
- the name of the user on the system.
- password
- the encrypted optional user password.
- UID
- the numerical user ID.
- GID
- the numerical group ID for this user.
- user_name
- the (optional) comment field (often a full user name).
- directory
- the user's $HOME directory.
- shell
- the program to run at login (if empty, use /bin/sh).
/etc/passwd passwd(1), login(1), group(5)
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