"-name" references in/etc/passwd

[Carey Jung]

Does anyone know what a passwd entry beginning with "-name" or "- at netgroup"
does in SunOS running NIS?  The Sun man page for passwd(5) says such entries
"disallow any subsequent entries" for name or netgroup from the NIS map.  Thus,
this would seem to be a way to deny a given NIS user access to a given NIS
client machine.  

However, this doesn't seem to be the case.  login, rlogin, and the library
function getpwent() all work nicely for "+" entries, but seem to completely
ignore "-" passwd entries.  Is this feature broken?  If not, how does it work?


--
Carey Jung                 TIVOLI Systems                 carey at tivoli.com
                ...!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!tivoli!carey