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Re: passwd file




On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, James Olin Oden wrote:

> If you know that your users files are only in a specific
> place (like their home directory) then you can save time by doing:

hold your horses! you should NEVER assume to know where ALL your user's
files are. fomr example, if you use sendmail, they have a mail box in
/var/spool/mail/.. (natively, that is). if you use 'at' or 'cron', check
out /var/spool/cron/... or /var/spool/at/... . the list could go on
forever (files in /tmp/.., or /var/tmp/.. , files generated by who knows
what program).

one other thing of note: the order of doing the changes (i.e. do i first
change the UID in the passwd file and then chown all the old files, or the
other way around - is of no importance - things might get screwed up
anyways, due to a program trying to open the file under this user's ID,
while using one UID, and having the file owned by the other UID, and thus
failing the operation, or creating a new file under the old UID instead of
the new UID, etc.). i'd suggest that after performing the change, one
should wait a minute or two, and then perform a finaly 'find /' check for
the old UID, to make sure no new files with the old UID were created
during the process.

in any case, i think the original poster was refering to the creatin of
new users, not to the changing of a UID for old users. In this case
(creation) all these problems do not exist anyways.

guy


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