vipw
—
edit the password file
The
vipw
utility edits the password file
after setting the appropriate locks, and does any necessary processing after
the password file is unlocked. If the password file is already locked for
editing by another user,
vipw
will ask you
to try again later. The default editor for
vipw
is
vi(1).
When run without options,
vipw
will work with
the password files in
/etc. The
-d
option may be used to specify an
alternative
directory to work with.
The
vipw
utility performs a number of
consistency checks on the password entries, and will not allow a password file
with a “mangled” entry to be installed. If
vipw
rejects the new password file, the
user is prompted to re-enter the edit session.
Once the information has been verified,
vipw
uses
pwd_mkdb(8)
to update the user database. This is run in the background, and, at very large
sites could take several minutes. Until this update is completed, the password
file is unavailable for other updates and the new information is not available
to programs.
If the following environment variable exists it will be utilized by
vipw
:
EDITOR
- The editor specified by the string
EDITOR
will be invoked instead of the
default editor
vi(1).
This can be used to allow a script to non-interactively modify the
password file.
PW_SCAN_BIG_IDS
- See
pwd_mkdb(8).
chpass(1),
passwd(1),
passwd(5),
adduser(8),
pw(8),
pwd_mkdb(8)
The
vipw
utility appeared in
4.0BSD.
The mechanism for checking for password file modifications requires that the
modification time of the password file changes. This means that in a default
configuration where file system timestamps are not calculated with sub-second
precision,
EDITOR
has to run for at least
one second. Non-interactive editor scripts should invoke
sleep(1)
or equivalent to ensure this happens.