[TUHS] Questions about * and ! in the password field of passwd and shadow

[Arnold Robbins via TUHS]

Marc Haber via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Short research also told me that the format of /etc/passwd 
> or other backing stores for the user account database are nowadays 
> neither part of POSIX nor of SuS.

This is on purpose, IIUC. What is standardized is the C level
routines getpwent() et al.  This makes a lot of sense given that
networked password and group databases have been around for
a long time (Sun's NIS [nee YP], NIS+, and others.)

Thus a local password file need not give the full story about
all of the users who can login to a system.

HTH,

Arnold