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NAME | DESCRIPTION | FILES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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PASSWD(5) File Formats and Conversions PASSWD(5)
passwd - the password file
/etc/passwd contains one line for each user account, with seven
fields delimited by colons (“:”). These fields are:
· login name
· optional encrypted password
· numerical user ID
· numerical group ID
· user name or comment field
· user home directory
· optional user command interpreter
The encrypted password field may be blank, in which case no password
is required to authenticate as the specified login name. However,
some applications which read the /etc/passwd file may decide not to
permit any access at all if the password field is blank. If the
password field is a lower-case “x”, then the encrypted password is
actually stored in the shadow(5) file instead; there must be a
corresponding line in the /etc/shadow file, or else the user account
is invalid. If the password field is any other string, then it will
be treated as an encrypted password, as specified by crypt(3).
The comment field is used by various system utilities, such as
finger(1).
The home directory field provides the name of the initial working
directory. The login program uses this information to set the value
of the $HOME environmental variable.
The command interpreter field provides the name of the user's command
language interpreter, or the name of the initial program to execute.
The login program uses this information to set the value of the
$SHELL environmental variable. If this field is empty, it defaults to
the value /bin/sh.
/etc/passwd
User account information.
/etc/shadow
optional encrypted password file
/etc/passwd-
Backup file for /etc/passwd.
Note that this file is used by the tools of the shadow toolsuite,
but not by all user and password management tools.
crypt(3), getent(1), getpwnam(3), login(1), passwd(1), pwck(8),
pwconv(8), pwunconv(8), shadow(5), su(1), sulogin(8).
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 PASSWD(5)
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