From the course: Linux: System Maintenance

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Audit security access, groups, and users

Audit security access, groups, and users - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux: System Maintenance

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Audit security access, groups, and users

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- [Instructor] Taking a moment to audit who has access to resources on your system is a good idea for ongoing maintenance. Often, access to resources is controlled by creating users and adding them to groups. At the command line, we can take a look at the users on our system with cat /etc/passwd. This shows users' short names, as we can see with my account here, an x representing the encrypted password for the user, which you can see in the shadow file, the numeric user ID and primary group ID, the comment field, which is often used for a human-friendly name, the user's home folder, and the users logged in shell. The system creates a lot of users, and some software creates users too. So in this file you'll see a lot more than just the regular human users for your system. These system and service accounts aren't for logging in but rather for adding the ability to control the permission that different processes have. Otherwise they'd either need to run as root, which can be dangerous…

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