What is ETC Group file in Linux?

The /etc/group is a text file which defines the groups to which users belong under Linux and UNIX operating system. Under Unix / Linux multiple users can be categorized into groups. This method, amongst others, also enables the Superuser to delegate some administrative tasks to normal users.

What is group password in Linux?

A group password in Linux allows a user to temporarily (in a subshell) gain extra permissions of a group, after successfully entering the group password. Some of the disadvantages are: Sharing a password is not good; a password should be personal. You can also solve this by adding the user to a secondary group.

What is ETC shadow used for?

/etc/shadow is used to increase the security level of passwords by restricting all but highly privileged users’ access to hashed password data. Typically, that data is kept in files owned by and accessible only by the super user.

What is a group password?

The idea with a group password is that if you needed to gain access to a particular group (one that you weren’t listed as being a member of), you could do so using the newgrp command, and be challenged with a password to gain access to these alternative groups.

What is the use of group password?

Group passwords are an inherent security problem since more than one person is permitted to know the password. However, groups are a useful tool for permitting co-operation between different users.

What does Linux shadow file contain?

The /etc/shadow file stores actual password in encrypted format and other passwords related information such as user name, last password change date, password expiration values, etc,. It’s a text file and readable only by the root user and is therefore less of a security risk.

What is hidden in etc shadow?

To prevent this, the hashed passwords were eventually moved into a file readable only by root (and occasionally a privileged group of administrators), /etc/shadow . This hides the hashes from normal users of the system while keeping them available for user authentication purposes.

What is ETC in bash?

When Bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the –login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile, if that file exists. profile, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable.

How do you set a password for a group in Linux?

Linux Groups Can Have Paswords To set up a new group with a password you can use the groupadd command with the -p parameter. Just to make things slightly tricky -p does not take a cleartext password but takes one already encrypted by crypt(3). The easiest way to create one of these is using openssl.