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VSTa manual pages  - PASSWD (6)

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passwd - password file

CONTENTS

Description
Files
See Also

Passwd is a text file, that contains a list of the system’s accounts, giving for each account some useful information like user ID, group ID, home directory, shell, etc. It should have general read permission (many utilities use it to map user IDs to user names), but write access only for the superuser.

If you create a new login, first put a star in the password field, then use passwd(1) to set it.

There is one entry per line, and each line has the format:

username:password:UID:GID:name:capability:directory:environment:shell

The field descriptions are:

username
	The name of the user on the system. This is what you enter to the login program.
password
	This is the password field. Passwords are not actually stored in passwd(6) , but rather in shadow(6) 'this field just contains a star *.
UID
	The numerical user ID. In UNIX, this would define what files you can access, but not so in VSTa. Rather, in VSTa, the "UID" is simply that: an ID related to one particular logged in user. It is used to answer questions like "who created this file?", but not "who can read this file?".
GID
	The fourth field is the "group ID". This ID indicates a specific group id group(6). By being a member of a particular group, you get capabilities. So a set of capabilities suitable for some particular group of accounts is described in group(6) for a given group ID. Then, each user account has the same group ID, and they all share those capabilities.
name
	This field is optional and only used for informational purposes. It contains the real name of the user using the account.
capability
	The sixth field, "usr.vandys", lists your initial capability. The capability name is hierarchical, and is a reference to the numerical counterpart, looked up via ids(6). So after you log in, your capabilities are the sum of this one, plus any additional ones granted due to your group ID.
directory
	the user’s $HOME directory.
environment
	The eighth field is your environment path. Very much unlike UNIX, your environment is kept in an external server, which is global to the system. A given user’s environment variables exist under /env with the given name. Each variable shows up as a simple file within that directory.
shell
	the program to run at login (if empty, use /bin/sh). If set to a non-existing executable, the user will be unable to login through login(1).

/vsta/etc/passwd

passwd(1), login(1), group(6), ids(6), shadow(6)