| -B | Store data in big-endian format. |
| -C | Check if the password file is in the correct format. Do not change, add, or remove any files. |
| -L | Store data in little-endian format. |
| -N | Tell pwd_mkdb to exit with an error if it cannot obtain a lock on the file. By default, we block waiting for a lock on the source file. The lock is held through the rebuilding of the database. |
| -p | Create a Version 7 style password file and install it into /etc/passwd. |
| -i | Ignore locking failure of the master.passwd file. This option is intended to be used to build password files in the release process over NFS where no contention can happen. A non-default directory must also be specified with the -d option for locking to be ignored. Other use of this option is strongly discouraged. |
| -d directory |
| | Store databases into specified destination directory instead of /etc. |
| -u username |
| | Only update the record for the specified user. Utilities that operate on a single user can use this option to avoid the overhead of rebuilding the entire database. |
| -s cachesize |
| | Specify in megabytes the size of the memory cache used by the hashing library. On systems with a large user base, a small cache size can lead to prohibitively long database file rebuild times. As a rough guide, the memory usage of pwd_mkdb in megabytes will be a little bit more than twice the figure specified here. The default is 2 megabytes. |
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The two databases differ in that the secure version contains the user’s encrypted password and the insecure version has an asterisk (‘‘*’’)
