On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 10:53:46PM +0000, Christos Zoulas wrote:
>In article <20060411212738.GC21922@sta.duo>,
>George Georgalis <george@galis.org> wrote:
>>Can anyone point me to documentation (or source) regarding
>>passwords in the /etc/group file. I'm most interested in a
>>standard on what's expected there and how/when it might be used.
>>eg, what might be the consequence of a null passwd field in the
>>group file?
>>
>>     The passwd field is an optional encrypted password.  This
>>     field is rarely used and an asterisk is normally placed in it
>>     rather than leaving it blank.
>>
>>That, from group(5) is the *only* mention I can find.
>
>Passwords in groups were checked by newgrp, which changed the primary
>effective and real group of a new forked shell to be the group specified
>on the command line.
>
>http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/newgrp.html
>
>NetBSD does not ship with a newgrp command, although older versions of BSD,
>and FreeBSD include a copy of newgrp. You should be able to use the FreeBSD
>version of newgrp on NetBSD. Eventually we should put it back too since it
>is part of the SUS (although not particularly useful).

Thanks, presumably it uses crypt(3) (me fails to check...)

As I was browsing around the SUS, I noticed cpio and tar are
marked LEGACY. Presumably pax (which I've not tried) provides all
the functionality; but I see it uses rsh (rmt(8)) by default for
remote connections.  Any plans to change that to ssh? or stick to
using pipe to ssh?

// George


-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator <IXOYE><
http://galis.org/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george@galis.org