PASSWD(5)

NAME
passwd - password file

DESCRIPTION
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 general read permission (many utilities, like ls(1) use it to map user IDs to user names), but write access only for the superuser.

In the good old days there was no great problem with this general read permission. Everybody could read the encrypted passwords, but the hardware was too slow to crack a well-chosen password, and moreover, the basic assumption used to be that of a friendly user-community. These days many people run some version of the shadow password suite, where /etc/passwd has *'s instead of passwords, and the encrypted passwords are in /etc/shadow which is readable by root only.

When you create a new login, leave the password field empty and use passwd(1) to fill it. A star (*) in the password field means that this user can not login via login(1).

There is one entry per line, and each line has the format:

    login_name:passwd:UID:GID: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).

NOTE
If your root file system is on /dev/ram, you must save a changed password file to your root file system floppy before you shut down the system and check the access rights. If you want to create user groups, their GIDs must be equal and there must be an entry in /etc/group, or no group will exist.

FILES
/etc/passwd

SEE ALSO
passwd(1), login(1), group(5), shadow(5)