Re: Password maintenance

[Ian Darwin <ian@mail.softquad.com>]

>I didn't realize OpenBSD supported these. I read the passwd(5) man page
>and it said there were two fields in the /etc/master.passwd file that
>specified password and account expiration times, but after monkeying with
>them on my machine it didn't seem to notice.

It depends on what you mean by monkeying. Did you edit the file directly,
or did you use vipw? Vipw does the necessary step of reloading the binary
databases (which all the programs like login and passwd use) from the
text version. Just editing the text file doesn't do much for you.
Note that the binaries are also rebuilt at login, so editing the
non-master versions (/etc/passwd) directly is also pretty much a no-op.

As for whether they actually work, I don't know at this point and I'm
not able to get at my full source archive to see. But they surely
don't work if you only edit the master.passwd file directly.

ian@darwinsys.com

P.S. This is not a "tech"-level discussion so I am redirecting it to misc.