GSHADOW(5)              File Formats and Conversions              GSHADOW(5)

NAME         top

       gshadow - shadowed group file

DESCRIPTION         top

       /etc/gshadow contains the shadowed information for group accounts.

       This file must not be readable by regular users if password security
       is to be maintained.

       Each line of this file contains the following colon-separated fields:

       group name
           It must be a valid group name, which exist on the system.

       encrypted password
           Refer to crypt(3) for details on how this string is interpreted.

           If the password field contains some string that is not a valid
           result of crypt(3), for instance ! or *, users will not be able
           to use a unix password to access the group (but group members do
           not need the password).

           The password is used when a user who is not a member of the group
           wants to gain the permissions of this group (see newgrp(1)).

           This field may be empty, in which case only the group members can
           gain the group permissions.

           A password field which starts with an exclamation mark means that
           the password is locked. The remaining characters on the line
           represent the password field before the password was locked.

           This password supersedes any password specified in /etc/group.

       administrators
           It must be a comma-separated list of user names.

           Administrators can change the password or the members of the
           group.

           Administrators also have the same permissions as the members (see
           below).

       members
           It must be a comma-separated list of user names.

           Members can access the group without being prompted for a
           password.

           You should use the same list of users as in /etc/group.

FILES         top

       /etc/group
           Group account information.

       /etc/gshadow
           Secure group account information.

SEE ALSO         top

       gpasswd(5), group(5), grpck(8), grpconv(8), newgrp(1).

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the shadow-utils (utilities for managing
       accounts and shadow password files) project.  Information about the
       project can be found at ⟨http://pkg-shadow.alioth.debian.org/⟩.  If
       you have a bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://pkg-shadow.alioth.debian.org/getinvolved.php⟩.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-shadow/shadow.git⟩ on 2018-02-02.
       (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2017-09-27.)  If you discover any rendering prob‐
       lems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a bet‐
       ter or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have corrections
       or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org

shadow-utils 4.4                 02/02/2018                       GSHADOW(5)

Pages that refer to this page: gpasswd(1),  newgrp(1),  sg(1),  group(5),  grpck(8),  vigr(8),  vigr(8@@util-linux),  vipw(8)

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