Re: Why does the user 'nobody' have a shell?
>From man 5 passwd:
The command interpreter field provides the name of the
user's command language interpreter, or the name of the
initial program to execute. Login uses this information
to set the value of the SHELL environmental variable. If
this field is empty, it defaults to the value /bin/sh.
So really, Debian isn't doing anything here other than making
the default explicit.
Processes running as 'nobody' still have an environment, and could
potentially make use of SHELL, could they not? I think where you've gone
wrong is in interpreting this field strictly as a "login shell" field.
Ben
On 7 Jan 2000, Ben Gertzfield wrote:
> A admin friend of mine just brought this up.
>
> On Debian systems, the user 'nobody' has a shell:
>
> nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/home:/bin/sh
>
> Why is this? I looked on a bunch of other unix systems, and *none* of
> them give 'nobody' a shell. (Of course, the account is locked on
> Debian as it should be.)
>
> Is there any good reason? If not, should I file a bug? It seems kind
> of weird to give a user that is solely created for a non-login user to
> have a login shell!
>
> Ben
>
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