On 22Sep2008 09:22, kwhiskerz <kwhiskerz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: | I have noticed differences in /etc/groups lately. | Older files had the form group:*: | Newer files have the form group :x: | On my laptop yesterday, a groups.rpmnew was created with the form group:: | I read the manual and it suggests that the latter form means no password. | What does all of this mean? What effect does the * or x have? If it is blank, | what does it mean for a group to have no password? No password for login? Why | would such a file be generated upon yum update for my laptop? It looks like the same change that happened to passwd when shadow passwords were introduced. Originally passwords had their hashes in the passwd file; the hashes are one way and expensive to reverse, but not strong enough by modern standards. A user with no password had a "*" in the crypt field of the passwd file. Because UNIX crypts can be brute forced these days, and on general principles (passwords, and by extension their hashes, are secrets) the hashes got moved into /etc/shadow, which is not publicly readable and hods the hashes and some other information (expiry times etc). And to signify that the hash was _not_ inline in the passwd, and passwd entry with a hash in /etc/shadow has an "x" in the crypt field. It looks like they have gone for the same scheme with groups. Regarding your question about group password, there is a command called "newgrp" for having a process obtain membership in a particular group. See "man newgrp". Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <cs@xxxxxxxxxx> DoD#743 http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/ -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
