comments in /eetc/passwd and group

[Shawn Badger]

I agree that editing them by hand is a very bad idea, but I have some people
that insist on it and they above me in the Org chart.

That being said some of those people want to include comments and such in
the files. I can not how ever just say no that is a stupid idea without
first having something to say why that is a stupid idea.

I am working on the comments and blank lines first and then after they get
used to that I can work on the hand editing portion, but for now I just need
something solid other than poor practice.



On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 10:46 AM, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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