Shadow Utilities

Shadow passwords are a method of improving system security by moving the encrypted passwords (normally found in /etc/passwd) to /etc/shadow which is readable only by root. During the installation of Red Hat Linux, you were given the option of setting up shadow password protection on your system.

The shadow-utils package contains a number of utilities that support:

NotePlease Note
 

There are some additional points of interest concerning these utilities:

  • The utilities will work properly whether shadowing is enabled or not.

  • The utilities have been slightly modified to support Red Hat's user private group scheme. For a description of the modifications, please see the useradd man page. For more information on user private groups, please turn to the section called User Private Groups.

  • The adduser script has been replaced with a symlink to /usr/sbin/useradd.