What does '*' symbol in /etc/passwd means?

[David W. Tamkin]

frechett at spot.Colorado.EDU, whose name seems to be Ian Frechette, wrote 
<1991Jun14.051958.17564 at colorado.edu>, which had a lot of really good
information but a couple things unfortunately he typed it a bit too quickly.

| There is a bit more to it than just the fact that * is not in the encryption 
| charcter set (which is true).  Valid characters are [a-zA-Z/.].

Valid characters are those fifty-four plus [0-9], totaling sixty-four.  That
is why there are 4096 possible pairs if you randomly make two selections from
the entire set with order counting.  (The salt may consist of two identical
characters [there's a 1 in 64 chance of that] and order *does* count here, so
even though there are only 2016 distinct doubletons in a set of sixty-four
elements, there are 4096 possible salts).

| For fun.. look at the string in /etc/passwd that is your encrypted passwd,
| change it.. then change it back.  Look again at the string; it will be
| different due to a new randomly chosen salt.  

By "change it" Ian must have meant to change your password and to change
it back (something any user can do), not to change the encrypted string in
/etc/passwd.  If your system uses a shadow file, the same thing will happen,
but you won't be able to see it unless you have read permissions on the
shadow file.

Otherwise, thank you for a very informative explanation.

David Tamkin  PO Box 7002  Des Plaines IL  60018-7002  dattier at vpnet.chi.il.us
GEnie:D.W.TAMKIN  CIS:73720,1570  MCIMail:426-1818  708 518 6769  312 693 0591

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