/etc/passwd- and /etc/group- ???

[williams_dr]

Hi all,

Hope someone can shed some light on this for me. Not sure if this is the right forum for this, but it seems security related, so here goes. I've searched the forums some and haven't seen this before, but forgive me if it's been answered elsewhere.

Just finished installing Gentoo 1.4 rc1 and I discovered that in addition to /etc/passwd and /etc/group, I have a /etc/passwd- and /etc/group- (note the hyphen on the ends).

Permissions seem to be 644 on passwd and group and 600 on passwd- and group-.

Can anyone explain what the *- files are for? adduser and the like appear to update passwd and group, but certain system apps seem to reference passwd- instead of passwd (kdm for example in coming up with the list of usernames to present in the login icon box. This is in fact how I discovered the other files; my newly created username didn't show up).

What's the scoop?

Thanks for any help.

Dave

[Neo-einstein]

If I'm not completely wrong the hyphened files are a kind of backup copy of the real ones. Thou it is strange that kdm refers to them and to the real ones
Try restarting X or KDE to see your new users show up !
_________________
n-e

[williams_dr]

Thanks for the reply. You are correct that they are backups, as I discovered last night fooling around some more.

I also found the kdm problem last night. My supposition that kdm was referring to the wrong passwd file was incorrect as it turned out. I discovered while reading through more of the documentation on the KDE site that kdm will only list users who have a default shell listed in /etc/passwd, and my entry was missing that field. As soon as I put /bin/bash in passwd explicitly, it worked fine.

Thanks,

Dave