From: woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods)
Subject: Re: misc/14272: useradd and /etc/security interact poorly
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 14:10:12 -0400 (EDT)

...

> > Perhaps when password-less users are added, the password field should
> > be set to a single asterisk instead of multiple asterisks.
> 
> I'd rather see /etc/security use the same kind of logic the actual
> password checking algorithm uses to determine if a value in the
> pw_passwd field could ever possibly represent any encrypted password
> (using whatever current encryption scheme might be configured for the
> system).

This makes sense to me -- but who will write it ;-)