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

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <27017 at adm.brl.mil> e910276 at dal1.kaist.ac.kr (KiChang Yang) writes:
>	bin:*:2:1::/bin:/bin/csh
>Could you tell me what this symbol means?

All it means is that no encrypted password can possibly match it.
In other words, there is no valid password for accessing that account.
(It's a "system" account, not assigned to a human user.)