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

[Pim Zandbergen]

siebeck at infoac.rmi.de (Wolfgang Siebeck ) writes:

>rickert at mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

>>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?

>I guess, Yang is using a machine running SYSV and this machine 
>uses /etc/shadow. In that file, you'll find an entry for user 'bin' with a
>password like the ones we are used to ...

At least on this System V machine, an 'x' is placed in the /etc/passwd
file if the encrypted password is actually located in /etc/shadow.
A '*' definitely freezes an account.
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