Linux – How to Access /etc/shadow on Mac

bashlinuxosx

I've been trying to run this Linux passwd-generator file on my Mac. I modified enough the script to make it to work well with directories under OSX:

#!/bin/sh
# build-passwd.sh - creates a password file which contains all OS users (except root)
PASSWDIR=$(cd "$(dirname "$0")"; pwd)/etc
PASSWFN=$PASSWDIR/passwd
if [ ! -d "$PASSWDIR" ]; then
mkdir $PASSWDIR
echo "$PASSWDIR created"
fi
sudo awk -F":" '
BEGIN {OFS=":"}
{if ($1 != "root" && $2 != "!" && $2 != "*") print $1,$2}
' /etc/shadow > $PASSWFN **<===here's my problem**
if [ $? = 0 ]; then
echo "Password file saved to $PASSWFN"
fi

But didn't succeed because there is no "/etc/shadow" on Mac.

So do you know if there is some alternative to this? (I also tried to copy/paste the file from my Linux installation using the same password)

Best Answer

Starting with Lion, there is a shadow file per user. All of those are stored in /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users directory and are accessible by root only. For example:

$ ls -lah /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/
total 296
drwx------  77 root  wheel   2.6K Jul 27 20:30 .
drw-------  12 root  wheel   408B Jul 27 20:30 ..
-rw-------   1 root  wheel   4.0K Jul 27 20:30 Guest.plist
-rw-------   1 root  wheel   260B Jul 27 20:17 _amavisd.plist
-rw-------   1 root  wheel   254B Jul 27 20:17 _appleevents.plist
-rw-------   1 root  wheel   261B Jul 27 20:17 _appowner.plist
-rw-------   1 root  wheel   276B Jul 27 20:17 _appserver.plist

Also, those are binary property list files. The easiest way of viewing them is using plist command. For example:

$ plutil -p /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/root.plist 
{
  "smb_sid" => [
    0 => "XXXX-XXXX"
  ]
  "uid" => [
    0 => "0"
  ]
  "passwd" => [
    0 => "XXYYXX"
  ]
}
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