I can find the /etc/passwd and/or the /etc/group file. Whats up?
The user database of information for UNIX was long ago set in /etc/passwd. This was easy to implement and manage at the time it was originally designed. The number of computer users has grown and technology has changed. Unfortunately people continue to misunderstand that things have evolved. The portable method of obtaining user information is through the user and group API’s (getpwnam(), getgrgid(), etc.). These API’s are a standard with POSIX and SUS. No one, or no program, should be relying on a file named /etc/passwd. Information may now be distributed across several differently named files, stored with NIS, LDAP or Kerberos. With Windows the user database is managed through Active Directory and/or the local LSA. That some UNIX systems running on Windows continue to use and/or create /etc/passwd file just shows a bad design. As an example, U/Win originally did the same thing with periodic refreshes of /etc/passwd. During one conference when it was pointed out to the U/Win folks tha
