HP-UX Reference (11i v2 04/09) - 1M System Administration Commands N-Z (vol 4)

vipw(1M) vipw(1M)

NAME

vipw - edit the password ﬁle

SYNOPSIS

vipw

DESCRIPTION

vipw edits the password ﬁle while setting the appropriate locks, and does any necessary processing after

the password ﬁle is unlocked. If the password ﬁle is already being edited, you will be told to try again

later. The vi editor is used unless the environment variable

EDITOR indicates an alternate editor.

vipw performs a number of consistency checks on the password entry for

root, and does not allow a

password ﬁle with an incorrectly formatted root entry to be installed. To help reduce the possibility of

leaving the system in an unbootable state, root’s entry is not considered properly formatted if it has a user

ID that is not zero, or if it has a shell other than

/sbin/sh, /usr/bin/csh, /usr/bin/ksh,or

/usr/bin/sh.

Please refer to passwd (4) and the Managing Systems and Workgroups manual for further details of pass-

word ﬁle format.

WARNINGS

/etc/ptmp ﬁle that is not removed when a system crashes prevents further editing of the

/etc/passwd ﬁle using vipw after the system is rebooted. /etc/ptmp is the standard lock used by

all commands which knowingly modify /etc/passwd.

Successful execution of

vipw is not sufﬁcient for proper system operation. To help maintain consistency

with other system databases, editing of the password ﬁle with vipw is generally discouraged. Please use

sam, useradd, usermod, userdel, chfn, chsh or passwd to edit /etc/passwd.

AUTHOR

vipw was developed by the University of California, Berkeley.

FILES

/etc/ptmp