Support for shadow passwords has been enhanced significantly for Red Hat Linux
5.1. The shadow-utils package contains a number of utilities
that support:
- Conversion from normal to shadowed passwords and back (pwconv,
pwunconv).
- Verification of the password, group, and associated shadow files
(pwck,
grpck).
- Industry-standard methods of adding, deleting and modifying user
accounts (useradd, usermod, and userdel).
- Industry-standard methods of adding, deleting, and modifying user
groups (groupadd, groupmod, and groupdel).
- Industry-standard method of administering the /etc/group file
(gpasswd).
Please Note: There are a few additional points of interest concerning these
utilities:
- The utilities will work properly whether shadowing is enabled or not.
- The utilities have been slightly modified to support Red Hat Software's user
private group scheme. For a description of the modifications, please see
the useradd man page. For more information on user private groups,
please turn to Section 11.1.3.
- The adduser script has been replaced with a symlink to
/usr/sbin/useradd.
