At 08:14 PM 3/4/00 +0100, you wrote:
Hello all, does anybody know where I can find detailed information about the format of entries in /etc/passwd ?
Sure. You may have already tried "$ man passwd". That doesn't work because it defaults to the wrong section of the manual.
But if you do a "$ man 5 passwd" you'll get section 5 of the manual, and the entry will tell you (among other things):
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 con-
tains 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 out-
put 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
executable, the user will be unable to
login through login(1).
You may also notice that second field, which according to this entry should have either an encrypted password or a "star" (asterisk) has a lower case "x" on your RaQ. That's because you've got shadow passwords installed. When shadow passwords are installed the field will contain an "x" and the password encryption will appear in the /etc/shadow file.
Jeff -- Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>