The passwd file gets it's name from the historical password file when there were in fact encrypted passwords in the file. Back then CPUs were generally less than 100Mhz so brute force password cracking was at best a very leisurely hobby. After it became more of a thing people got the idea that maybe it made sense to put it in a seperate file without public read access. Still, you CAN put encrypted passwords in the password file if you really want to, else the :x: just says go look in the shadow file.
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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I think that was meant to be a reply to me, so I'll respond.
Technically, /etc/passwd can have encrypted passwords in it, but as far as I'm aware, no distro has done that in decades, so realistically its not that risky. It does expose the user names though.
@CameronDev No, but there was a time that was the norm. There also was a time that triple-DES was the encryption standard. But again those times a 100Mhz single core CPU was a high end CPU.
Can you share the lines from /etc/passwd for your user and the user your adding? Despite its name, there are no passwords here, that is in /etc/shadow
Edit: can you su to login as the user?
How do I pull those up? Yep, I'm one of those, used the GUI as I don't know how to do it from the terminal, plus I'm immensely forgetful
/etc/passwd: you may be able to get to this from the GUI file manager.
If not, open a terminal and type: cat /etc/passwd. Copy the relevant lines.
To test the login, from a terminal, type su otheruser, replace otheruser with the username from /etc/passwd. It should ask for a password, put that in and it should log you in. Type whoami and make sure its the same username as you expected. Paste any errors here.
Users with an UID below 1000 are not shown in the user list on gdm (that's the login manager you're using?).