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NAME | DESCRIPTION | FILES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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
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.
The encrypted password field may be empty, 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.
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.
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 *, the user will not be able to use a
unix password to log in (but the user may log in the system by other
means).
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 ⟨https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow⟩. If
you have a bug report for this manual page, send it to
pkg-shadow-devel@alioth-lists.debian.net. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow⟩ on 2020-08-13. (At that
time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the repos‐
itory was 2020-08-13.) If you discover any rendering problems in
this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a better 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 4.8.1 08/13/2020 PASSWD(5)