SYNOPSIS

checkpw prog

DESCRIPTION

checkpw reads descriptor 3 through end of file and then closes descriptor 3. There must be at most 512 bytes of data before end of file.

The information supplied on descriptor 3 is a login name terminated by \0, a password terminated by \0, a timestamp terminated by \0, and possibly more data. There are no other restrictions on the form of the login name, password, and timestamp.

If the password is unacceptable, checkpw exits 1. If checkpw is misused, it may instead exit 2. If there is a temporary problem checking the password, checkpw exits 111.

If the password is acceptable, checkpw runs prog.

prog consists of one or more arguments.

Compatible tools

There are other tools that offer the same interface as checkpw

Note that these tools do not follow the getopt interface. Optional features are controlled through (1) the tool name and (2) environment variables.

The password database

checkpw checks the password against the content of the file Maildir/.password in the user's home directory corresponding to the login name.

Maildir may be overidden through the environment variable $MAILDIR.

Process-state changes

Before invoking prog, checkpw sets up $USER, $HOME, $SHELL, its supplementary groups, its gid, its uid, and its working directory.

FILES

~/Maildir/.password

AUTHOR

This manual page was written by Gerrit Pape <[email protected]>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system.