Etc passwd file fields

Twitter Reddit Hacker News Facebook. Share link Tutorial share link. Sign Up. DigitalOcean home. Community Control Panel. Hacktoberfest Contribute to Open Source. By Justin Ellingwood Published on September 4, Introduction Passwords and authentication are concepts that every user must deal with when working in a Linux environment. The first thing to note is that this file is accessible by unprivileged users.

Let's look at the format of the file. Each user has a unique ID that identifies them on the system. The root user is always referenced by user ID 0. Each group has a unique group ID. Each user has a "primary" group that is used as the group by default. Again, the root group's ID is always 0. This field can be used to describe the user or user's function. This can be anything from contact information for the user, to descriptions of the service the account was made for.

This field contains the shell that will be spawned or the command that will be run when the user logs in. You can see what this looks like with the root entry above. As noted above, the asterisk signifies that this account cannot be used to log in. This value is measured in days from the Unix "epoch", which is January 1, If there is a password change requirement, this will warn the user to change their password this many days in advance.

The last field is unused. Having separate home directories for each user is one of the factors that enables Linux to be a truly multi-user OS. This field contains the name of the default shell associated with a user. The shell is the environment in which a user can run commands and scripts. The passwd file contains user-related information such as the username, password details, home directory path, user and group IDs, etc.

As you have seen, most Linux users are usually part of a group to ease the administration of file access and other privileges. You can add users to groups yourself if you have the necessary permissions to do so. Want to better manage users on Ubuntu Linux? The answer is to create groups, then use the Ubuntu add user feature. Mwiza develops software by profession and writes extensively on Linux and front-end programming. Share Share Tweet Email.

Mwiza Kumwenda 48 Articles Published. Subscribe to our newsletter Join our newsletter for tech tips, reviews, free ebooks, and exclusive deals! Click here to subscribe. The default Solaris passwd file contains entries for standard daemons, processes usually started at boot time to perform some system-wide task, such as printing, network administration, and port monitoring.

Administrative daemon associated with running system binaries to perform some routine system task. Administrative daemon associated with system logging or updating files in temporary directories.

Assigned to users or software processes that do not need nor should have any special permissions. Assigned to a user or a process that needs access to a system through some application but without actually logging in.

Default passwd File The default Solaris passwd file contains entries for standard daemons, processes usually started at boot time to perform some system-wide task, such as printing, network administration, and port monitoring. Umbrella system daemon associated with routine system tasks.