system password's file

[Robert Watson]

On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 iwan at staff.usd.ac.id wrote:

> I want to migrate from linux to freebsd. My linux box (mail server) have 
> alot of user (hundreds) --this is the problem. I dont know which file 
> which the password's file. I dont want typing user name and its password 
> one by one. Beside of that, thereis possibly my users change their 
> passwords. How can I do this migrating ? (save) I'm sorry my English is 
> not good.

The main man page you want to look at is passwd(5), which documents the 
formats of the /etc/master.passwd and /etc/passwd file.  In FreeBSD, the 
master.passwd file is the equivilent of the shadow file in Linux.  What 
you want to do is convert the Linux password files to the master.passwd 
file in FreeBSD, and then run

     pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd

This will cause /etc/passwd to be built from /etc/master.passwd, and also 
cause the rebuilding of two hash files that cache the user data in a 
machine-readable format to improve performance, /etc/pwd.db (cache of 
passwd) and /etc/spwd.db (cache of master.passwd).  You can use the -C 
argument to simply test if a file has the correct format and run sanity 
checking, which is useful if you want to test a conversion without 
possibly installing the results.  Take a look at the pwd_mkdb(8) man page 
for details.

Robert N M Watson