HP-UX Reference (11i v2 04/09) - 1 User Commands A-M (vol 1)

chfn(1) chfn(1)

WARNINGS

The encoding of ofﬁce and extension information is installation-dependent.

For historical reasons, the user’s name, etc., are stored in the

/etc/passwd ﬁle. This is an inappropri-

ate place to store the information.

Because two users may try to write the

passwd ﬁle at once, a synchronization method was developed.

On rare occasions,

chfn prints a message that the password ﬁle is busy. When this occurs,

chfn sleeps

for a short time, then tries to write to the

passwd ﬁle again.

AUTHOR

chfn was developed by the University of California, Berkeley.

FILES

/etc/passwd

/etc/ptmp

NOTES

The chfn command is a hard link to

passwd command. When chfn is executed, actually the passwd

command gets executed with appropriate arguments to change the user gecos information in the reposi-

tory speciﬁed in command line. If no repository is speciﬁed the gecos information is changed in

/etc/passwd ﬁle.