Talk:Passwd

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)