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The files are
files consisting of newline separated records, one per user, containing
ten colon (‘‘:’’) separated fields. These fields are as follows: User’s login
name. User’s password. User’s id. User’s login group id. User’s general classification
(unused). Password change time. Account expiration time. General information
about the user. User’s home directory. User’s login shell. The field is
the login used to access the computer account, and the field is the number
associated with it. They should both be unique across the system (and often
across a group of systems) since they control file access. While it is
possible to have multiple entries with identical login names and/or identical
user id’s, it is usually a mistake to do so. Routines that manipulate these
files will often return only one of the multiple entries, and that one
by random selection. The login name must never begin with a hyphen (‘‘-’’);
also, it is strongly suggested that neither upper-case characters or dots
(‘‘.’’) be part of the name, as this tends to confuse mailers. No field may
contain a colon (‘‘:’’) as this has been used historically to separate the
fields in the user database. The password field is the form of the password.
If the field is empty, no password will be required to gain access to
the machine. This is almost invariably a mistake. Because these files contain
the encrypted user passwords, they should not be readable by anyone without
appropriate privileges. The group field is the group that the user will
be placed in upon login. Since this system supports multiple groups (see
this field currently has little special meaning. The field is currently
unused. In the near future it will be a key to a style database of user
attributes. The field is the number in seconds, from the epoch, until
the password for the account must be changed. This field may be left empty
to turn off the password aging feature. The field is the number in seconds,
from the epoch, until the account expires. This field may be left empty
to turn off the account aging feature. The field normally contains comma
(‘‘,’’) separated subfields as follows: name user’s full name office user’s office
number wphone user’s work phone number hphone user’s home phone number This
information is used by the program. The user’s home directory is the full
path name where the user will be placed on login. The shell field is the
command interpreter the user prefers. If there is nothing in the field,
the Bourne shell is assumed.
If YP is active, the file also
supports standard YP exclusions and inclusions, based on user names and
netgroups. Lines beginning with a ‘‘-’’ (minus sign) are entries marked as being
excluded from any following inclusions, which are marked with a ‘‘+’’ (plus
sign). If the second character of the line is a ‘‘@’’ (at sign), the operation
involves the user fields of all entries in the netgroup specified by the
remaining characters of the field. Otherwise, the remainder of the field
is assumed to be a specific user name. The ‘‘+’’ token may also be alone in
the field, which causes all users from the and YP maps to be included.
If the entry contains non-empty or fields, the specified numbers will
override the information retrieved from the YP maps. As well, if the or
entries contain text, it will override the information included via YP.
On some systems, the field may also be overriden.
(O’Reilly
& Associates)
User information should (and eventually will) be stored
elsewhere. Placing YP exclusions in the file after any inclusions will
have unexpected results.
The password file format has changed
since 4.3BSD. The following awk script can be used to convert your old-style
password file into a new style password file. The additional fields and
are added, but are turned off by default. Class is currently not implemented,
but change and expire are; to set them, use the current day in seconds
from the epoch + whatever number of seconds of offset you want. BEGIN {
FS = ":"} { print $1 ":" $2 ":" $3 ":" $4 "::0:0:" $5 ":" $6 ":" $7 }
A file format appeared in YP file format first appeared in SunOS.
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