Location of user passwords in FreeBSD

salon_sue

I am in a system administration course in college in which I have my own FreeBSD server set up, so I obviously can login as the root user. I need to figure out where the actual passwords for users are stored, where they are not encrypted, if they are even stored in such a way. I know that all user account information as well as process information is stored in the /etc/passwd directory but there are only "*" in the password fields. I just need...

Originally asked by Jeff on Stack Exchange (unix) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

It's the master.passwd file: http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/Etc/master.passwd But you should use vipw or chpass to edit the file.

Full answer by Wolph: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/23269 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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