comments in /eetc/passwd and group

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 10:03 -0700, Shawn Badger wrote:
> Somebody did mention security to me as well, but when I asked them to
> elaborate on it they couldn't. 
> I agree you can maintain a separate file for the comments, but I am
> looking for something that would say if you have blank line lines in
> in the /etc/passwd or /etc/group file this can happen. And if you have
> #comments in them this can happen, but so far I have not been able to
> find anything like that.
> 
> In order to defend my stance, I need to be able to say this will
> happen if you do that.
----
It seems to me that beyond...

# Do NOT hand edit these files under penalties that might include
# death, getting your hands chopped off or just termination.

seems to be unnecessary as hand editing passwd/group/shadow files is
fraught with potentially devastating possibilities and so many tools are
available to handle the job.

Not to mention that a system like LDAP is entirely capable of handling
comments.

But in fairness, I think there is a lot of context that you are not
sharing with us that would probably be meaningful to the discussion.

Craig


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.