Yum is updating /etc/shadow?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thursday 12 January 2012 05:53:42 g wrote:
> if you compare "/etc/shadow" to "/etc/shadow.rpmnew" when it is there,
> you will see that yum/rpm has added a program's name to "/etc/shadow"
> when yum/rpm adds a new program that needs to be assigned an id.
> 
> this also happens to "/etc/group", "/etc/gshadow", and "/etc/passwd".
> 
> why "/etc/shadow.rpmnew" was removed is hard to answer.

AFAIK, yum/rpm can use the "usual" method of getting an id for a new program 
(calling useradd or similar), which doesn't involve creating a shadow.rpmnew 
file.

Besides, this would be understandable if there actually were any new programs 
to be assigned an id during an update. But in this case there weren't any, and 
additionally the timestamp on /etc/shadow has not changed since I last created 
a user, so nothing was actually modified.

I am just baffled by the existence of the warning about /etc/shadow.rpmnew, 
which also turns out to not exist at all.

It's not a big deal after the fact, but it just triggered the
"this-shouldn't-happen" alarm in my head when I saw the warning. Hence the 
question... :-)

Best, :-)
Marko