/etc/passwd and shadow was blank

[Joe Zeff]

On 04/06/2011 11:54 PM, Rod James Bio wrote:
>
> Now my question is what was the cause why those files had gone blank? I
> never experience this kind of problem before in ubuntu and centos so I
> was thinking it was a distro-specific problem. I already search google
> but the same question had gone unanswered by the community.

I'm only guessing, you understand, but it's quite possible that the two 
problems are related.  Some program tried to modify the password file 
(and shadow, of course) and as a first step, renamed them to make 
backups.  Then, it opened /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, creating new 
versions but was unable to write to either file because the / partition 
was full.  (Remember, /etc must be on the / partition because it has to 
be available before the other partitions are mounted because that's 
where fstab lives.)