Talk:Passwd

History
It would be nice to add a History section that includes the etymology of the command word. Specifically, why it's "passwd" and not "password". --199.46.245.232 20:56, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
 * That's easy: most early operating systems had severe restrictions on file name length. A limit of as few as 6 characters was not uncommon (Forth was famously named that way because "fourth" was too long, since the limit was five characters). In later systems with no such restrictions mangled commands were often retained for historical reasons or just because they take less keystrokes (in that vein, it probably would have been "pwd" if that command wasn't already in use).
 * This is not specific to "passwd", though, and calling it an "etymology" would go too far. 212.178.108.2 09:18, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

not encrytped
passwd does not encrypt a password, it hashes it. There is a significant difference between encryption and salted hashing in regard to usefulness for password security. 217.30.176.249 21:16, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I corrected the article.--Unixguy 16:31, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
 * In some setups, the PAM system will not hash the password at all storage points, and might not even encrypt it. This is due to some legacy systems that is invoked by PAM.--Henke37 13:15, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Merge this back?
I'm not sure I see the value in splitting this into three separate articles. passwd is an overarching concept that can be easily and thoroughly discussed within the bounds of one article; even before it was split into three articles it was marked as a stub, so it's not the length of the original article that was a problem. Now we have three stub-length articles.

It makes sense to have three separate manual pages, maybe less so to have three separate encyclopedia articles. If anyone can present a strong case for having this split into three, I'm keeping an open mind, but if there isn't such a case, I think this should be returned to a single article. Regards, NapoliRoma (talk) 13:39, 27 June 2008 (UTC)


 * A mere five years late, I've merged passwd (command), passwd (file) and shadow (file) here. Passwd (database) doesn't need an article at all, so I've redirected that to the main NSS article. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 15:06, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

See also password?
--Sasuketiimer (talk) 03:55, 13 August 2010 (UTC)