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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Removing Users from FreeBSD 2.0
Date: 2 Jun 1996 16:31:04 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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takakami@worldnet.att.net (Takafumi Kamiya) wrote:

> I used vipw and now the user is deleted clean.  Thank you for your
> tip!!  But then what are passwd and passwd.master there for if you
> have a separate database?  For compatibility?

/etc/passwd is for compatibility, and perhaps a few shell scripts
might break when you remove it.  Perl scripts automagically use the
getpwbyfoo() functions of the library, thus don't need it either.

/etc/master.passwd is what its name is suggesting: the master file.
You make every change there (usually by vipw, passwd, or chpass), and
this will then be taken by pwd_mkdb(8) to create the .db files.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)