Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 04:11:23 -0800 From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> To: Ben Smithurst <ben@scientia.demon.co.uk> Cc: John Starkey <jstarkey@polaris.umuc.edu>, Jim Smart <jim@tsw.com.au>, FreeBSD <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Changing shells. Message-ID: <20000315041123.A14789@fw.wintelcom.net> In-Reply-To: <20000315104549.C16722@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk>; from ben@scientia.demon.co.uk on Wed, Mar 15, 2000 at 10:45:49AM %2B0000 References: <7DC4EFF7C2FED2119BCD0000E8D5E42B378F84@mail.internal.tsw.com.au> <38CF44DB.BC38DA55@polaris.umuc.edu> <20000315104549.C16722@strontium.scientia.demon.co.uk>
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* Ben Smithurst <ben@scientia.demon.co.uk> [000315 03:54] wrote: > John Starkey wrote: > > >> There is a copy of the file /etc/passwd stored in memory. > >> This is what is used for authenification of logins. It is > >> read at boot time. > > > > Isn't that kinda inefficient?? > > Indeed it would be, if it were true. I'm pretty certain FreeBSD does no > such thing. (If it were only read at boot time, you'd have to reboot to > add a user! I know this isn't the case.) Whoa, I sense a trail of mis-information being generated, I tracked down where it started here: ------- Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 01:07:59 -0700 From: John Starkey <jstarkey@polaris.umuc.edu> To: Jim Smart <jim@tsw.com.au>, FreeBSD <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Changing shells. Message-ID: <38CF44DB.BC38DA55@polaris.umuc.edu> References: <7DC4EFF7C2FED2119BCD0000E8D5E42B378F84@mail.internal.tsw.com.au> Thanks for the reply. > There is a copy of the file /etc/passwd stored in memory. > This is what is used for authenification of logins. It is > read at boot time. Isn't that kinda inefficient?? Why waste RAM on something that isn't used that often?? (On a personal system). > $ man vipw for more information. > Yea I tried that, man wasn't installed. I did a minimal just to make sure it would work. I'm doing a custom now. Thanks, John ------- This is just not true, the system stores the password information in /etc/spwd.db which is a database file, you need to use the system utilities to have it your edits to the password system automatically rebuild the database files. vipw, chsh and pw are amongst the utlities to properly update the system database files. You should not be editing /etc/passwd nor /etc/master.passwd directly. -- -Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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