32.2. pwd — The password database

Platform: Unix

*Platforms: *Unix

This module provides access to the Unix user account and password database. It is available on all Unix versions.

Password database entries are reported as a tuple-like object, whose attributes correspond to the members of the passwd structure (Attribute field below, see <pwd.h>):

Index	Attribute	Meaning
0	pw_name	Login name
1	pw_passwd	Optional encrypted password
2	pw_uid	Numerical user ID
3	pw_gid	Numerical group ID
4	pw_gecos	User name or comment field
5	pw_dir	User home directory
6	pw_shell	User command interpreter

The uid and gid items are integers, all others are strings. KeyError is raised if the entry asked for cannot be found.

Note: In traditional Unix the field pw_passwd usually contains a

password encrypted with a DES derived algorithm (see module crypt). However most modern unices use a so-called shadow password system. On those unices the pw_passwd field only contains an asterisk ('*') or the letter 'x' where the encrypted password is stored in a file /etc/shadow which is not world readable. Whether the pw_passwd field contains anything useful is system-dependent. If available, the spwd module should be used where access to the encrypted password is required.

It defines the following items:

pwd.getpwuid(uid)

Return the password database entry for the given numeric user ID.

pwd.getpwnam(name)

Return the password database entry for the given user name.

pwd.getpwall()

Return a list of all available password database entries, in arbitrary order.

See also:

Module grp

An interface to the group database, similar to this.

Module spwd

An interface to the shadow password database, similar to this.