Why authconfig create -ac files

[Tomas Mraz]

On Po, 2014-01-13 at 08:37 -0500, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> On 01/12/2014 08:17 AM, Miroslav Suchy wrote:
> > I just wonder why `authconfig` creates: /etc/pam.d/system-auth ->
> > system-auth-ac /etc/pam.d/postlogin -> postlogin-ac 
> > /etc/pam.d/password-auth -> password-auth-ac etc.
> > 
> > Why those links and why -ac suffix? Why it does not modify
> > original files directly? Is there some story behind?
> 
> The way that things work is that the "system-auth" name is the one
> that's included into other PAM stacks that require authentication. By
> default, this is prepared by authconfig, but there are situations
> where an admin would like to take control (and not risk that later
> passes of authconfig might overwrite their changes). In this
> situation, they would break the symlink and create a separate file for
> the primary config file, thus guaranteeing that authconfig would not
> overwrite it.

Yes, I want to confirm that as I added this mechanism in place before
RHEL-5. It is also described in the manual page system-auth-ac(5).

-- 
Tomas Mraz
No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back.
                                              Turkish proverb
(You'll never know whether the road is wrong though.)