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

[Wolfgang Siebeck]

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:
>>
>>I'm much interested in UNIX system.
>>Recently, I found this '*' curios symbol in /etc/passwd.
>>For example,
>>	bin:*:2:1::/bin:/bin/csh
>>Could you tell me what this symbol means?

> It doesn't mean anything in particular.  It represents the encrypted password.
>It happens that no encrypted password can ever be '*', so this is just one
>way of preventing anybody from ever logging in on this account.
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 ...

-ws
-- 
siebeck at infoac.rmi.de (Wolfgang Siebeck)