From the course: CompTIA Linux+ (XK0-005) Cert Prep

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User account file

User account file - Linux Tutorial

From the course: CompTIA Linux+ (XK0-005) Cert Prep

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User account file

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- [Teacher] Linux stores all local user account information in a text file. That text file is /etc/passwd. Let's view this file by opening a terminal and using the less command. Type in less /etc/passwd, and hit Enter. You can see that there's one user account per line. Now, let's analyze this file. The /etc/passwd file uses colons to delimit the columns of which there are seven. Let's take a look at each column individually. The first column is the username, usernames in Linux are case sensitive. The administrator's username is root and should be the first line of the file. The second column shows the encoded password, or if the system is using the Shadow Suite, there will be an x as a placeholder saying the password is encoded and is not stored in this file. It's extremely rare for any modern Linux distribution to not use a Shadow Suite so this column usually has an x in it. Before the introduction of the Shadow…

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