useradd with * in passwd field

[Chris Tyler]

On Mon, 2009-04-06 at 19:37 +0530, Sudarshan Soma wrote:
> Hi All,
> I need to add a user who will have entry in the /etc/passwd file as
> below,  where the passwd field is marked as *
> 
> myuser:*:12:23:guest:/:/bin/bash
> 
> I need to do this by using command useradd, but i am not able to find
> easier way to do this by commands other than manually editing passwd
> file.
> 
> 
> The intention is to create a user with whcih login can never happen
> Please suggest

Hi Pavan,

First, you should in almost all cases have shadow password support
enabled, so the actual passwords will be in /etc/shadow not /etc/passwd.

Second, useradd will by default create an account which cannot be
accessed until a password is added (typically with the passwd command).
If you need to lock an account that has a password so that it cannot be
used for login, you can use "passwd -l username"; note that this
prepends an exclamation mark to the password field (does the same thing
as your star). The opposite command is "passwd -u username", which
unlocks the account.

-Chris