User name field changed back by passwd

taco_truck_tom

I am finishing installing a amd 64 FreeBSD 11.1 with Gnome 3. When I configured there a user, I did not input the User Name field; so I was perplexed when GDM booted, and showed me a user as "User &"; it turned out passwd filled it that way. The thing is that I edited /etc/passwd to put there a proper name; and GDM showed it properly. However upon changing the password of that user with passwd as root, the user name field was changed back to...

Originally asked by Rui F Ribeiro on Stack Exchange (unix) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

You should not edit /etc/passwd as it is not the master copy - use vipw instead. See the manual page for more.

Full answer by Richard Smith: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/386415 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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