NAME | DESCRIPTION | FILES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

PASSWD(5)               File Formats and Conversions               PASSWD(5)

NAME         top

       passwd - the password file

DESCRIPTION         top

       /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.

FILES         top

       /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.

SEE ALSO         top

       crypt(3), getent(1), getpwnam(3), login(1), passwd(1), pwck(8),
       pwconv(8), pwunconv(8), shadow(5), su(1), sulogin(8).

COLOPHON         top

       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 2017-07-05.
       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 4.4                 07/05/2017                        PASSWD(5)