etc-shadow

[Chris Murphy]

I'm curious about how the hash in /etc/passwd is generated.

I know it's SHA512 based, since the 2nd field starts with $6$. But the
characters that follow aren't a SHA512 hash. It looks like it was run
through base64.

I read this:
http://www.aychedee.com/2012/03/14/etc_shadow-password-hash-formats/
But Fedora doesn't have mkpasswd by default, whereas passwd seems to
only update shadow rather than outputting to stdout. And if there's a
salt used I can't tell how that would be referenced.

Thanks,